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Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn Next UN Climate Summit (COP26) Into Damp Squib

https://mailchi.mp/fb3a07eef1f6/legal-gaps-and-us-elections-may-turn-cop26-into-damp-squib?e=f4e33fdd1e

GWPF Newsletter 05/03/20
Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn COP26 Into Damp Squib
The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit

It’s beginning to dawn on the organisers of COP26, which will take place in November, that the international deadlock which has plagued these annual meetings since the Paris Agreement, is likely to solidify, threatening to turn the Glasgow meeting into yet another damp squib — as expected. —GWPF, 5 March 2020

Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election. With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.–Sherelle Jacobs, The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2020

1) Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn COP26 Into Damp Squib
GWPF & Climate Home News, 5 March 2020

2) Greta Thunberg Accuses EU Of Climate Betrayal
The Times, 5 March 2020

3) Sherelle Jacobs: The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit
The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2020

4) Will Coronavirus Recession Kill Green Craze That Has Infected Board Rooms In Recent Years?
Financial Times, 5 March 2020

5) Green ‘Lawfare’ A $65bn Deal Hit To Projects Down Under
The Australian, 5 March 2020

6) At Climate Meeting, German Eco-Socialist Suggests “Shooting The 1% Rich”
No Tricks Zone, 4 March 2020

7) Green Fanatics Celebrating Coronavirus Epidemic
Martín López Corredoira, Science 2.0, 4 March 2020

1) Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn COP26 Into Damp Squib
GWPF & Climate Home News, 5 March 2020

It’s beginning to dawn on the organisers of COP26, which will take place in November, that the international deadlock which has plagued these annual meetings since the Paris Agreement, is likely to solidify, threatening to turn the Glasgow meeting into yet another damp squib — as expected.

The outcome of the US election could send shockwaves through the climate diplomacy process as countries are expected to submit new climate plans by November. (Photo: Shealah Craighead for White House/Flickr)

Legal gaps and US election could delay climate ambition before Glasgow summit
Climate Home News

Legal ambiguities in the Paris climate agreement and uncertainties about the US presidential election may encourage some governments to sit on the fence until late 2020 to decide on climate action for the coming decade.

In the worst case, governments could wait until after a critical climate summit in Glasgow in November, known as Cop26, widely billed as a test of global ambition to address global warming at the first five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries have agreed to update their climate plans to limit global warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial times. There is stark scientific evidence and growing international pressure for this to happen this year.

The United Nations has called for steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as early as possible in 2020 to help limit global warming to 1.5C – the tougher Paris goal.

But it is now adjusting to the idea that submissions of some countries’ climate plans, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), will come late in the year.
“We are aware of the fact that some NDCs may likely be submitted in the last quarter of the year so we are adjusting our work to this reality,” the secretariat told Climate Home News in an emailed response to questions.

Full story

2) Greta Thunberg Accuses EU Of Climate Betrayal
The Times, 5 March 2020

Greta Thunberg turned on her hosts in Brussels yesterday to accuse the European Union of only “pretending” to fight climate change and betraying the future of Europe’s children.

The teenage Swedish activist had been invited by the European Commission to address a meeting of commissioners before the EU unveiled plans for its first climate law, part of its Green Deal agenda, which would make it a legal requirement for the EU to be carbon neutral by 2050. Miss Thunberg said it did not go far enough.

She told a press conference that the plan was a betrayal of science, the 2016 Paris climate accord and “seven and a half million” protesting school children.

“This climate deal is surrender because nature doesn’t bargain and you cannot make deals with physics,” she said. “You can’t escape no matter how badly you want to or how hard you try and the longer you keep running away from that truth, the bigger your betrayal to your own children.”

Critics say the proposed law fudges the issue of legally binding emissions reduction targets for all 27 member states. Carbon neutrality will only be measured at the EU level to allow individual countries, such as coal-burning Poland, extra time. The commission ducked calls for a new 2030 target of a 50 to 55 per cent reduction in emissions to keep the present target of 40 per cent.

Miss Thunberg, 17, and other environmentalists have called for a minimum 80 per cent reduction.

Her denunciation is deeply embarrassing for the EU which regards itself as the global leader on fighting climate change.

Full story

3) Sherelle Jacobs: The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit
The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2020

People did not vote to take back control only to surrender to an even more imperious and destructive strain of metropolitan ideology.

Just when we thought the war was over, it is starting to dawn on some London hacks that it has only just begun. Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election.

With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.

A savvy politician like Boris Johnson can still reverse No 10’s green strategy, which moved on this week from banning petrol and diesel cars to the revival of onshore wind farms. He must – all the ingredients for another seismic uprising are already simmering.

First is the drift towards disaster at the Treasury. With the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, reportedly poised to end the freeze on fuel duty for all motorists, voters are referring to zero carbon as “the new austerity”.

Indeed, the message to voters is sonorously clear – elites have learnt precisely nothing from the past 10 years. In 2008, people paid the price for dysfunction in the banking industry; today they must foot the bill for shortcomings in the energy industry, which is further away from a carbon-free breakthrough than it should be. Still, why tackle the source of problems when you can administer “tough medicine” to the masses?

Second is the rising sense that the UK is still being sabotaged by the zealotry of unaccountable elites. Just as the EU establishment derives its legitimacy from the teleological assumption that the future is borderless universalism, the green establishment poised to take its place sees the planet rather than the people as the highest authority. As a result, the country is heading in a direction at odds with the ambitions of ordinary people.

In particular, it is becoming disturbingly apparent that the Government prizes green targets over “unleashing” Britain’s potential. The cast-iron case for a road-building revolution, for example, clangs a little too harshly against the hollowness of eco-politan sensibilities. Whitehall is genuinely convinced that Red Wall utopia is cycling to work from a rabbit hutch on the outskirts of Birmingham. They find the idea that people might actually aspire to drive to their downtown office from their semi-detached in Dudley, and at the weekends cruise, sunroof down, to the Bullring for shopping, completely ghastly.

The gulf in understanding was ever thus. As innovation professor James Woudhuysen alludes to in his writings, after decades of post-war policymaking hostile to the very concept of cars, what with them disrupting the working classes’ “community cohesion” and causing urban sprawl, in the Blair era there was the glimmer of intellectual breakthrough. Politicians finally recognised, at least in principle, that post-industrial towns can only be revived if they are an attractive commute from thriving cities.

But there was a catch: elites could not bear to prioritise hard logic over their whimsical blueprints for car-free city centres and visceral disdain for the selfish individualism of the open road. Mr Johnson’s green-era promises to be equally irrational. There will be no relief for congested roads. A Cummings-style plan to connect the rustbelt tech hubs of tomorrow with superhighways is for the birds.

The green agenda is also botching public transport. The epitome is HS2, a serpent-shaped monstrosity which slithered from the depths of a conniving political mind to appease the environmental lobby. True, it’s not exactly common knowledge that, in 2009, Andrew Adonis persuaded the then transport secretary, Geoff Hoon, to announce a high-speed railway to placate eco-activists spitting venom over a third Heathrow runway. But with former Brexit Party campaigners organising once again, it won’t take long for people to realise that green tape is suffocating our potential on a scale that rivals red tape from Brussels.

All the more so given how quickly the project to “level up” the country has descended into fatuous virtue signalling. There is a joke going around the North that you can predict the metropolitan mayors’ latest gimmick about solar panels and cycling routes based on whatever nonsense Sadiq Khan has tweeted three weeks before in London.

Architecture firms hungry for contracts are churning out plans for triple-glazed “affordable” homes too expensive to build on a mass scale, and offices with bike basements. One source told me that, all the while, “disenchanted employees squint at each other in meetings waiting to see if anyone dares to speak out”.

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