Climate Change Weekly # 563—COP 30 Week Two: Paris Agreement Failure Redux

From THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE

IN THIS ISSUE:

• COP 30 Week Two: Paris Agreement Failure Redux
• High Costs of Green Energy Transition Leading to Continued Hydrocarbon Use

COP 30 Week Two: Paris Agreement Failure Redux

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In last week’s CCW I discussed why I thought no true progress in the effort to halt climate change will result from any agreement(s) ultimately produced at COP 30 in Belem, Brazil. I also described the failures of some past agreements as a harbinger of the failures to come. Below, in a guest post, Robert Bradley Jr., founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research and a longtime Heartland Institute policy advisor, examines in some detail climate alarmist James Hansen’s critique of the Paris climate agreement, developed at COP 21 and agreed to by nearly 200 nations. Hansen’s complaint was that the Paris agreement did not go far enough, lacking the teeth or true intention to end fossil fuel use on the short timeline he thought necessary.

Hansen, of course, is a former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is often referred to as the father of global warming. Hansen was clearly right about one thing: the Paris climate agreement was doomed to fail from its inception, only in part for the reason Hansen was concerned about. In fact, it has failed.

—HSB

Paris Agreement: Dead at Ten (James Hansen was right)

COP30, a carbon dioxide (CO₂)-fest of sorts, is failing. Major emitters have not shown up. Virtually all nations and regions are in serious noncompliance with their Paris Agreement goals, according to Climate Tracker, and the gap is widening. The new pitch is less about emissions than about the fantasy of cheap wind and solar and batteries heralding a new energy era. Yet the energy transition has been demoted to energy addition and now energy duplication; that is, rising energy prices resulting from climate policies.

James Hansen is a realist when it comes to the United Nations’ global warming negotiations; wind and solar energies; and the lobbying frenzy surrounding the issue. His statements should be remembered as the Paris Climate Agreement, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, turns ten years old this month.

In an interview with The Guardian in late 2015, the father of the climate alarm startled the rejoicing Progressive Left with this verdict post-COP21:

[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

Continuing with these pronouncements from Hansen in the same year:

Watch what happens in Paris carefully to see if all that the leaders do is sign off on the pap that UN bureaucrats are putting together, indulgences and promises to reduce future emissions, and then clap each other on the back and declare success.

And:

Big Green consists of several ‘environmental’ organizations, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each with $100+M budgets, each springing from high-minded useful beginnings, each with more high-priced lawyers than you can shake a stick at. EDF … was chief architect of the disastrous Kyoto lemon. NRDC proudly claims credit for Obama’s EPA strategy and foolishly allows it to migrate to Paris.

In previous posts, I have noted Hansen’s recalcitrance toward cap-and-trade, whether federal, state (California), or other countries (Australia or Quebec/Ontario). He lambasted Copenhagen (COP20) for its interest in cap-and-trade too. Ditto for the Paris agreement, Obama’s signature climate achievement.

Hansen wants a global CO₂ tax, complete with “border adjustments” (tariffs per country) to prevent “leakage.” Little chance. He knows wind and solar are too problematic and not scalable as are nuclear fission plants (which he supports). As he stated: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

The father of the climate alarm will not back down from his outlier, all-bad predictions of the human influence on climate. CO₂ fertilization is neglected, and anthropogenic warming is not divided into positive, benign, and negative to reveal a real-world metric.

To Hansen, the world is on fire from the enhanced greenhouse effect (what Michael “Climategate” Mann calls doomerism). In 2006, Hansen gave this ultimatum: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

A decade later, the die was cast where adaptation was the order of the day. But no. …. Consider this update from Hansen in 2023 in The Guardian [“‘We Are Damned Fools’: Scientist Who Sounded Climate Alarm in 80s Warns of Worse to Come,” (July 19, 2023). Oliver Milman began,

The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.

Hansen is then quoted, saying,

There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality—we knew it was coming. … It means we are damned fools. We have to taste it to believe it.

And continuing:

Things will get worse before they get better. This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.

The doomism dance of Hansen and his catastrophist fellow travelers continues, but in the wider world, alarmism is out, affordability in. Also, mitigation is out, adaptation in. A lot of hard work from free market groups, such as The Heartland Institute, is paying off.

—Robert Bradley Jr.

Sources: The Master Resource

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High Costs of Green Energy Transition Leading to Continued Hydrocarbon Use

A new report from McKinsey & Company, “Global Energy Perspective 2025,” forecasts coal, oil, and natural gas will continue to be the dominant sources of global energy well past 2050, regardless of the intentions and actions of those negotiating climate agreements and making commitments.

What a difference a year and a presidential administration make, it seems.

At present, hydrocarbons account for more than 60 percent of global electricity supply and 80 percent of primary energy consumption (because oil and gas dominate transportation fuels). McKinsey’s report for 2025 sharply adjusts prior projections. McKinsey’s 2024 energy outlook forecast a sharp decline in coal use by 2035 and fossil fuel use overall by 2050, with emissions reductions taking a higher priority than reliability and affordability. This year’s report says the priority has reversed:

Two overarching themes emerge from this year’s outlook. First, cost competitiveness and an economically pragmatic energy transition remain paramount. Energy affordability, reliability (including energy security at the national or regional level), and emission reduction continue to form a trio of priorities that drive energy decision-making. However, without affordability—along with bankability—widespread adoption of new low-carbon technologies will not happen.

Second, there is no silver bullet for decarbonization.

As a result of this shift in focus, whereas McKinsey in 2024 forecast coal use to fall by 40 percent by 2035, its 2025 report says coal demand is expected to increase by a minimum of 1 percent over the same time period, on strong demand for electrification in developing countries and greater AI demand globally.

“The dramatic reversal is driven by record commissioning of coal-fired power plants in China, unexpected increases in global electricity use, and the lack of viable alternatives for industries like steel, chemicals and heavy manufacturing,” summarized the CO2 Coalition’s Vijay Jayaraj in the Daily Caller. “McKinsey’s report confirms what seasoned energy analysts and pragmatic policymakers have long maintained: The energy transition will not be swift, simple, or governed solely by climate targets.”

Critically, McKinsey notes developing countries want power now, not when perfect solutions are developed in the future. Thus even as countries continue to add intermittent renewable power installations, hydrocarbon use will grow as well, even if it should fall as a percentage of the overall global power supply, because demand is also growing and fossil fuels are reliable and critical for some uses.

“In places such as India, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the top energy priorities are access, affordability and reliability, which together add up to national security,” writes Jayaraj. In addition, Jayaraj writes, “In countries like India, Indonesia and Nigeria, the scale of electrification and industrial expansion is enormous.

“These countries cannot afford to wait decades for perfect solutions,” Jayaraj continues, describing McKinsey’s conclusions. “They need ‘reliable and good enough for now.’ That means conventional fuels will be retained.”

McKinsey’s 2024 energy outlook report suggested hydrocarbons would fall to between 40 and 60 percent of global primary energy used by 2050. In its 2025 report, McKinsey now pegs coal, oil, and natural gas as providing as much as 55 percent of global energy in 2050, the upper end of last year’s prediction, based on changed priorities. Lower use seems to be out of the question. While a far cry from net zero, McKinsey’s estimate is most likely overly optimistic though still alarming for anyone concerned about reining in carbon dioxide emissions, based on estimates from other sources.

A recent report from Exxon estimates hydrocarbons will still account for 68 per cent of global energy demand in 2050.

Even the International Energy Agency (IEA) has changed its tune on the rapid transition away from fossil fuels. In recent years, in violation of its charter, the IEA had become a cheerleader for certain types of energy, primarily renewable power, to fight climate change. The IEA was supposed to be a neutral provider of energy analytics and analysis, not taking sides on energy sources or the energy and emissions goals of nations or industry. Now, despite rosy projections of emissions declines in recent years, even the IEA is getting slapped by reality. The energy transition is not materializing as fast as politicians’ lofty words and agreements demanded. In fact, the policies they have implemented fall far short of what is necessary to hit net zero, as the IEA reports. Accordingly, the IEA now projects hydrocarbon demand to continue growing through 2050.

The IEA does not provide a specific forecast for overall energy use in its World Energy Outlook 2025, but rather a range of outlooks depending upon government policies and technological developments. Under the practically impossible scenario in which governments sharply change course and impose the strict emission reductions necessary to reach the 1.5℃ temperature target set in the Paris climate agreement, hydrocarbons could fall to 20 percent of overall energy demand in 2050, a far cry from net zero though still a steep decline.

Under what the IEA calls its Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), fossil fuels’ share of global energy use falls to just over 50 percent by 2050—a little higher than McKinsey’s current projection but in line with it. The STEPS scenario assumes various governments’ existing energy and climate pledges are fully implemented by the deadlines they set for themselves, leading to a peak in oil demand around 2030. Yet, as Climate Change Weekly has detailed in recent weeks’ posts, governments are backsliding on their commitments, adding new hydrocarbon projects and making what were once hard targets flexible and open to change in response to economic and political concerns. As a result, at present STEPS also seems overly optimistic.

That leaves us with what the IEA calls the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), under which hydrocarbons’ share of global energy use falls to about 70 percent of the world’s total primary energy supply in 2050. This CPS is sort of a “business as usual” case based on governments strictly following policies and measures already in place late 2025, assuming they are implemented or enforced with no slackening or backsliding. In this scenario, fossil fuel use remains high and emissions targets are blown past.

Hydrocarbon use could fall below 70 percent even under the CPS scenario if there are unanticipated technological breakthroughs, but the percentage of hydrocarbons of global energy could also come in higher, should electric power demand grow at a faster pace than anticipated or the “transition” to renewables and electric vehicles stall because of technological, supply chain, political, and geopolitical difficulties or even widening conflicts hampering the mining, refining, and delivery of the minerals critical to renewable energy technologies or the construction and delivery of finished products.

Sources: McKinsey & Company; The Daily Caller

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Recommended Sites

Climate at a Glance	Climate Realism
Heartland’s Climate Page	Heartland’s Climate Conferences
Environment & Climate News	Watts Up With That
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Junk Science (Steve Milloy)	Climate Depot (Marc Morano)
CFACT	CO2 Coalition
Climate Change Dispatch	Net Zero Watch (UK)
GlobalWarming.org (Cooler Heads)	Climate Audit
Dr. Roy Spencer	No Tricks Zone
Climate Etc. (Judith Curry)	JoNova
Master Resource	Cornwall Alliance (Cal Beisner)
International Climate Science Coalition	Science and Environmental Policy Project
Chris Martz	Gelbspan Files
1000Frolley (YouTube)	Climate Policy at Heritage
Power for USA	Global Warming at Cato
Science and Public Policy Institute	Climate Change Reconsidered NIPCC)
Climate in Review (C. Jeffery Small)	Real Science (Tony Heller)
WiseEnergy	C3 Headlines
CO2 Science	Cartoons by Josh
The Climate Bet	Steve Milloy on Twitter
Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy	Friends of Science