Net Zero Samizdat
12 September 2023
1) Rise of China’s EVs threatens Western carmakers, analysts warn
Bloomberg, 12 September 20213
2) Europe’s solar industry warns of bankruptcies over Chinese imports
Financial Times, 11 September 2023
1) Rise of China’s EVs threatens Western carmakers, analysts warn
Bloomberg, 12 September 20213
Western automakers are set to lose a fifth of their global market share due to the unstoppable rise of more-affordable, cheaper-to-produce Chinese electric vehicles, according to UBS analysts.
Led by BYD, Chinese carmakers will almost double their share of the auto market to 33% by the end of the decade, UBS analysts including Patrick Hummel and Paul Gong wrote in an August 31 report.
Chinese manufacturers including Nio and Xpeng have ramped up their presence at last week’s IAA car show in Munich, and while German powerhouses Mercedes-Benz and BMW unveiled their next generation EVs, they won’t hit the market until 2025.
“The global auto industry is going to undergo seismic changes over the next 10 years or so,” Gong, UBS’s head of China autos research, said in an interview.
The report predicted Western automakers’ global market share will slump to 58% from 81% by 2030.
“That would be a crisis moment for Western legacy companies,” Gong said.
Tesla’s share is likely to rise to 8% from 2%.
BYD, China’s biggest-selling auto brand, has a 25% cost advantage over North American and European brands, giving the Shenzhen-based company ample firepower to undercut rivals on their home turf as it expands globally.
A UBS teardown of a 2022 BYD Seal sedan found 75% of the components were manufactured in-house. The figure – double the global average – is the secret to BYD’s cost-advantage in its quest to control its own fully integrated supply chain. The Seal is almost wholly made in China, with around 10% or less of parts from foreign suppliers, UBS estimates.
“It’s really a showcase of Chinese engineers and engineering dividends,” said Gong, pointing to BYD’s 600,000-strong workforce – five times larger than Tesla’s – including 90,000 engineers.
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2) Europe’s solar industry warns of bankruptcies over Chinese imports
Financial Times, 11 September 2023
Europe’s solar power industry has warned that a glut of cheap Chinese imports has pushed some manufacturers to the brink of bankruptcy, hampering EU’s efforts to boost local production of green technologies.
SolarPower Europe, a trade group for the industry, wrote to the European Commission on Monday that soaring stockpiles and “fierce competition” among Chinese manufacturers to gain market share in Europe had pushed down the prices of solar modules by more than a quarter on average since the beginning of the year.
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3) Britain needs China to hit Net Zero, says British Business Secretary
The Daily Telegraph, 12 September 2023
Britain needs China to reach its net zero targets, the Business Secretary has said, as Cabinet ministers insisted a row over spying should not result in a breaking of ties with Beijing.
Kemi Badenoch’s comments came as Tory backbenchers demanded action against China in the wake of allegations that a parliamentary researcher was a spy for the country.
She was one of a series of senior ministers, including the Prime Minister, to speak out in favour of continuing to engage with Beijing despite the claims.
On a tour of a Mini car factory in Oxford as she announced a £600 million investment to produce only electric cars by 2030, Mrs Badenoch said: “At the moment, China is leading on this technology, so we wouldn’t be able to get to where we want to get to on net zero by completely stopping or banning Chinese products.
“You can’t exclude Chinese-made products from the battery ecosystem.”
It came as Downing Street insisted that the UK had to be “in the room” with China, and Rishi Sunak argued that “speaking frankly and directly” with Beijing was in the country’s national interests.
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4) China and Germany: Firing up coal power while wind takes a back seat
The European Conservative, 9 September 2023
Countries postpone lofty climate goals to adapt to demands of reality.
Germany is dismantling a wind farm to make way for more coal mining, while China is on a spree to open new coal mines.
So goes the global push for renewable energy and decarbonisation, another sign of the reality check facing the proposed energy transition away from fossil fuels to ‘renewable’ energy such as wind.
The German energy giant RWE announced in October 2022 that it was removing a wind farm to expand its open lignite mine in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia. The first wind turbine has already been felled, and another seven are slated to be removed. The company will then have room to excavate some 15-20 million tonnes of lignite.
Lignite, also called brown coal, is the least efficient and therefore the most carbon-emitting form of coal. But it’s also abundant in western Germany, and according to the German government, it’s needed now more than ever.
The German government and RWE brokered the expansion of the lignite mine last fall because of the energy crisis engendered by the war in Ukraine and Germany’s subsequent loss of the Russian gas and oil it had relied on.
In exchange for permission from the German government to expand lignite mining for the moment, the company promised to ultimately phase out coal in 2030, eight years before the previous deadline.
With that caveat, the German government touted the deal as “a good day for climate protection,” though it seems there is little reason to believe that it wouldn’t once again prolong coal mining in 2030 should the need remain.
In fact, Germany’s attempt at switching to wind-sourced energy has proven a disaster. It is already far behind on its goals while facing increasing resistance from local communities to the installation of wind parks.
In another example of the schizophrenic tension between environmental rhetoric and political-economic reality, China has also abandoned its pledges to cut back on coal and has instead embarked on a coal burning spree.
The most recent reports from the watchdog groups Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air show that the country is set to approve a record number of coal power projects. The rash of new approvals started last year and has continued strong into 2023, according to analysis, with the Chinese government rubber-stamping two new coal power plants every week.
In raw numbers, in the first six months of 2023, China approved 52 gigawatt (GW) of new coal power, began construction on 37 GW of new coal power, announced 41 GW of new projects, and revived 8 GW of previously shelved projects. About half of the plants permitted in 2022 had started construction by summer. One gigawatt of energy is equivalent to one large coal-fired power plant.
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4) China and Germany: Firing up coal power while wind takes a back seat
The European Conservative, 9 September 2023
5) Europe’s climate consensus is fraying as Net Zero scepticism grows
Bloomberg, 10 September 2023
6) Net Zero Germany: The ‘sick man of the world’
The Sunday Telegraph, 10 September 2023
7) Net Zero sparking huge tax rises with warning climate change is UK’s top ‘priority’
GB News, 11 September 2023
8) Tory MPs renew calls for Government to rethink push to reach net zero by 2050
Daily Mail, 10 September 2023
9) London Mayors’ climate initiative calls for car, dairy and meat ban by 2030
UnHerd, 11 September 2023
10) Australia’s Nationals want ban on wind, solar farms until they’re automatically assessed
The Australian, 10 September 2023
11) Germany onshore wind auction dip casts doubt on renewable goals
Bloomberg, 8 September 2023
12) Walter Russell Mead: As India rises, the G-20 reveals a shifting world order
The Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2023
13) David Whitehouse: Pyrenean caves reveal a warmer past
Net Zero Watch, 12 September 2023
14) David Craig: The coming Eco-Totalitarianism
The Daily Sceptic, 11 September 2023
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5) Europe’s climate consensus is fraying as Net Zero scepticism grows
Bloomberg, 10 September 2023
From UK to Germany, politicians are retreating on green policy
In 2019, in the midst of bad-tempered parliamentary battles to shape the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU, the UK became the first country to legislate for net zero by 2050. The law passed without a single vote against.
The unity hasn’t lasted. The target remains in place, but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sees climate as a profitable political battle field in the run-up to an election polls show he’s likely to lose. His government has opposed the expansion of a low-pollution zone in Labour-controlled London and issued 100 new oil and gas exploration licenses, something opposition leader Keir Starmer has promised to halt.
Egged on by right-wing newspapers, some of his Conservative Party MPs want to go further — backtracking on the plan to phase out new internal-combustion cars in 2030, for example. They argue cutting emissions is an expense cash-strapped Britons can’t afford: the highest inflation rate in Europe means rising utility bills and food prices leave little for expensive electric vehicles or replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. There have even been calls for a referendum on the whole idea of net zero.
“We are governed by consent and the costs of net zero are risking that consent,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative MP and former energy secretary, who’s a standard bearer for the right of the party. “There was consent when economies were going nicely. There’s much less consent when economies are suffering from inflation.”
At the G20 summit in New Delhi on Sunday, Sunak said consumers shouldn’t be made to suffer from the push to reduce emissions. “The net zero story for me shouldn’t be a hair shirt story of giving everything up and your bills going up,” he said, according to the Guardian newspaper.
The fraying climate consensus isn’t unique to Britain. In June, 13,000 people gathered in a south German town in June to protest against a law to ban gas boilers, an issue that’s rocked Olaf Scholz’s coalition, where the Green party is a partner.
Parts of the EU’s so-called Green Deal have opposition from member states, notably France, which opposed stricter exhaust emissions rules, and Germany, which almost stopped a ban on combustion engines. Other leaders like Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo have urged caution over the impact that the fast pace of policies to reduce carbon emissions will have on industry. Dutch politics has been shaken by opposition to plans to curb emissions from its farms.
Polls show most European voters want action on climate change as heat waves, wild fires and floods make the impact of emissions ever clearer — but they’re reluctant to bear the cost of switching to less-polluting technology. For governments that means grappling with achieving long-term green targets, while not over-burdening companies and individuals with up-front costs as inflation continues to burn through people’s wallets…
In Germany, the government wants to set aside an off-budget €212 billion ($230 billion) fund to help finance the green push, but it is unwilling to implement measures that would affect voters’ homes and habits. The country is reluctant to cut down on its €65 billion of environmentally harmful subsidies, which help the nation’s automakers as they include commuter tax refunds and tax cuts on diesel or company fleets. There is also resistance within the coalition to implementing the EU’s stricter energy efficiency rules, which will require many house owners to invest heavily in renovation.
Germany has now watered down its ban on new fossil-fuel heating systems, which could have made a significant contribution to cutting emissions in the housing sector. The government also rolled back its district heating goals after heavy lobbying from utilities.
“We have seen this for years, when an economic crisis comes, climate protection is the first thing to be questioned,” said Susanne Dröge, who heads the climate protection and energy department in Germany’s Federal Environmental Agency.
Back in the UK, there are more decisions to come that will show how afar politicians are willing to row back on climate goals. Sunak this week watered-down a de facto ban on the development of new onshore wind farms, but was criticized by clean energy campaigners for not going far enough, with local consent still required.
This week, a UK government auction for offshore wind failed to attract any bids, throwing fresh doubt on the country’s ability to meet its net zero goal.
His new Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho will also have to decide whether to approve a controversial new oil field off the Shetland Islands, Rosebank, and if she wants to push-ahead with plans for the opening of a new coal mine in Cumbria, despite ongoing legal challenges and protests. The government approved plans for what will be the first major coal mine in decades late last year.
After Sunak clung on to a parliamentary seat he’d been predicted to lose in July, as he fell 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party in national polls, his aides now believe creating a firm dividing line over green policy, emphasizing the upfront cost of green investment, is the way to win.
The government is “trying to make it into a wedge issue between themselves and Labour,” said Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based nonprofit. “The world has been more focused on energy in the last few months than ever before.”
The lack of familiarity with climate policies isn’t helping, Ralston says. According to polling by the ECIU, 97% of Brits don’t know when the target gas boiler phase out will begin and 74% believe the phase-out of petrol-fueled cars is due to happen sooner than is the case. Half of people also don’t realize that gas boilers produce carbon emissions.
Labour strategists worry Sunak will call a general election in May next year, to coincide with London’s mayoral election, where Khan has faced a backlash for expanding the charging zone for the most polluting cars to the suburbs with short notice. Labour aides believe if Sunak chooses to do this, green issues will become one of the main political footballs they want to fight over.
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6) Net Zero Germany: The ‘sick man of the world’
The Sunday Telegraph, 10 September 2023
“The government’s story that green investments will bring a big boom is clearly misleading,” Ifo head Clemens Fuest told The Telegraph.
Olaf Scholtz took to the pulpit of Germany’s parliament this week to paint a picture of a country stuck in “gridlock” that is falling behind its peers.
Himself the worse for wear after a running accident, the 64-year-old chancellor said his country was afflicted by a “blight” of timidity and risk aversion that only an “act of national strength” can heal.
“While we discuss extending a single metro line or building a skyscraper, other countries have long since finished entire projects,” he said. “The people of our country are sick of the gridlock and so am I.”
It was a far cry from the braggadocio of only six months ago when Mr Scholz predicted investments in green energies would soon kick off boom years to rival those seen in the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and 1960s.
Instead, the country has been brought down to earth by a gloomy economic reality. Its economic institutes have repeatedly adjusted their growth forecasts downwards over the past few months, with the latest figures published by the influential Ifo Institute predicting the economy will shrink by 0.4 per cent this year.
In its report from August, the International Monetary Fund said that Germany would be the only major economy that would record no growth this year.
“The government’s story that green investments will bring a big boom is clearly misleading,” Ifo head Clemens Fuest told The Telegraph.
Climate policies such as a decision to phase out gas heating that was passed – albeit in a watered-down form – by the German parliament on Friday, are “of course raising costs and slowing down production” in the crisis-hit building sector, he added.
A headline pledge made by Mr Scholz’s government when it came to power in 2021 was to build 400,000 new homes every year to house a population that has grown by two million in a decade.
In reality, just 177,000 new homes are likely to be built in 2024, the lowest number in fifteen years.
The irony of the fact that the gas heating bill passed parliament in the same week Mr Scholz promised to simplify planning was not lost on the country’s centre-right opposition, the Christian Democrats (CDU).
The chancellor is “throwing sand in people’s eyes”, said Jens Spahn, the CDU economy spokesman. “The contradictions are so apparent… by passing the heating bill, the Scholz government is creating a new bureaucratic monster,” he added.
Not content with the description of Germany as the Sick Man of Europe – an unwanted title it last held during the high unemployment years of the 1990s – one CDU figure asserted: “We are now the sick man of the world.”
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7) Net Zero sparking huge tax rises with warning climate change is UK’s top ‘priority’
GB News, 11 September 2023
The shift to net zero could result in massive tax rises, with experts stating that fighting climate change is the UK’s “priority”.
Analysts at French bank BNP Paribas said that spending demands to resolve the climate crisis (sic) would result in the tax burden getting larger.
Marcelo Carvalho, the global head of economics at the bank, said: “I think it’s very unlikely that the tax burden is going to go down meaningfully anywhere in the world.
“It’s more likely that it either stays where it is or if anything goes higher.”
The UK’s tax burden is about to reach its highest level since World War Two, with the fiscal watchdog expecting it will account for 37.3 per cent of GDP by 2027-2028…
The debt level in the UK is the highest it has been in over 60 years.
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8) Tory MPs renew calls for Government to rethink push to reach net zero by 2050
Daily Mail, 10 September 2023
Tory MPs have renewed calls for the Government to rethink its push to reach net zero by 2050 amid claims shutting down Britain’s gas grid could cost £65billion.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has reiterated his commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions within the next 27 years.
But some Conservative backbenchers have become increasingly restless over the policy amid the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on families.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, said the Government had to look ‘very seriously’ at whether the 2050 target was ‘realistic’ amid claims of a multi-billion pound cost for closing fossil fuel infrastructure.
According the Telegraph, a draft report by the National Infrastructure Commission found the cost of decommissioning Britain’s gas network could cost the equivalent of £2,300 per UK household.
But the Government dismissed fears over the cost of shutting down obsolete infrastructure by insisting the gas network would ‘always’ be part of the UK’s energy system.
The newspaper claimed that the NIC draft report, of which it obtained a leaked copy, was the first time a public body had examined the future of the 176,000-mile network of buried gas pipes.
It said the NIC believes the grid could theoretically be converted to carry hydrogen, which has been proposed as a cleaner fuel, but that would also come at cost of ‘tens of billions of pounds’.
An industry source told the Telegraph that simply turning off gas supplies through the existing pupe network, without maintaining them, would lead to decay and risk roads falling in.
It is understood the estimates cited by the newspaper were from analytical work commissioned by the NIC from a third party as part of the next National Infrastructure Assessment, which is still being finalised.
Commenting on the claims, Sir Jacob said the Government’s net zero plans were ‘stuck in cloud cuckoo land’.
‘The Government cannot decommission the gas grid, because it can’t afford to,’ he added.
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9) London Mayors’ climate initiative calls for car, dairy and meat ban by 2030
UnHerd, 11 September 2023
A climate change initiative, spearheaded by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, is recommending against buying more than three items of clothing a year, privately owning a car and flying more than once every three years.
The C40 Climate Leadership group comprises, in its own words, “a network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis”, and has commissioned a report making suggestions for how cities can halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Khan, who chairs the C40 group, has received backlash from Londoners following this month’s Ulez expansion. Though the C40 Cities initiative, under the guise of the Clean Air Wins campaign, has shared videos in favour of Ulez, the Wall Street Journal this week highlighted the less highly-publicised proposals in its report, authored in collaboration with the University of Leeds, such as “no meat, no dairy and no private vehicles”. Also suggested is travelling by plane only once every three years, which the WSJ compares to the policies of “climate lockdowns”.
The report prescribes various “consumption interventions”, without outlining how these measures would be implemented. Reducing meat consumption to zero by 2030 is a listed target, but there is little in the way of detail about how this intervention could be achieved.
C40 Cities employs 433 people worldwide, according to LinkedIn, with headquarters in London, New York and Rio De Janeiro. Its website, however, provides few concrete examples of what C40 is actually doing. Real-life activities are buried under idealistic calls for “action now” and essays detailing milestones achieved by member cities. Yet money is pouring into C40. The UK arm of the company alone received £11m in grants and other funding in 2022. More than £7m of that money was spent on its own staff.
In November 2021, the UK Government invested £27 million in C40’s Urban Climate Action Plan (UCAP). While the initiative’s site claims that from 2018 to 2021 it “provided technical assistance and resources to 35 cities to develop climate action plans that effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance climate resilience”, the nature of this assistance and resources is not expanded upon.
The cities involved in UCAP seem equally at a loss. A less-than-clear summary of Accra’s involvement in UCAP can be found on the Accra Metropolitan Assembly website: “the delivery of the programme has included technical assistance for regional and local convenings, the development of knowledge products and a policy framework, capacity building, and informal sector integration advocacy campaigns.”
C40’s financial backers include extremely influential organisations and corporations, including Google, the Clinton Foundation and the World Bank, as well as the businessman and philanthropist George Soros. This support network of ideologically aligned leaders gives the C40 group serious heft, even if its activities aren’t widely known among the broader public.
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10) Australia’s Nationals want ban on wind, solar farms until they’re automatically assessed
The Australian, 10 September 2023
The Nationals are escalating their war on wind and solar farms, demanding a moratorium on all large-scale renewable energy projects until they undergo “proper approval processes” by the federal government.
In a push that gained early support from the Liberal Party, the Nationals federal conference passed a motion on the weekend calling on the government to “place a moratorium on all large-scale renewable energy projects until the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act … is amended to automatically refer all commercial-corporate renewable energy projects to the EPBC Act approval process”.
Queensland Nationals senator Matt Canavan said large coal mines and coal seam gas projects already underwent “a ready made stringent approval process”.
“The environmental impact of a wind farm is just as significant as a large coal mine, especially given the wind farm takes up even more land,” he told The Australian.
“We should have a ‘no regrets’ approach to the environment. We don’t have proper approval processes in place for large-scale renewable energy projects. Let’s get them in place first before we destroy our natural environment.”
NSW Nationals MP and Coalition frontbencher Barnaby Joyce said there was “red hot sentiment” in regional areas where people felt they were “powerless against wind factories, solar factories and this new cobweb of transmissions lines that’s destroying the environment and landscape”.
“People have been run over by foreign-owned wind farms and governments using their powers to get corridors through and then flipping the deal to foreign-owned transmission companies,” he said.
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11) Germany onshore wind auction dip casts doubt on renewable goals
Bloomberg, 8 September 2023
Germany’s latest onshore wind auction generated less interest than the previous sale, raising doubts about government targets for the expansion of renewable energy.
Companies offered to develop about 1.4 gigawatts of capacity in the Aug. 1 auction, down from 1.6 gigawatts in the May round, according to data from the country’s regulator Bundesnetzagentur. While the regulator says onshore awards have increased this year from 2022, Germany needs to triple its capacity to meet its goal of generating 80% of its power from renewables by 2030.
In anticipation of reduced interest and to maintain competition, BNetzA had cut the tendered amount from 3.2 gigawatts to about 1.7 gigawatts before the auction. That step was criticized by the wind industry as “too drastic.”
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12) Walter Russell Mead: As India rises, the G-20 reveals a shifting world order
The Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2023
India rising, China and Russia seething, Europe shrinking and America dithering.
Global gabfests rarely produce significant results, and last weekend’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi was no exception. The carefully drafted and painfully negotiated declaration will be forgotten as quickly as all its predecessors. The war in Ukraine will rumble on exactly as if the language on the war had not been tweaked to favor the Russian position. The invitation to the African Union to participate in future G-20 summits won’t change the way the world works.
But even if the G-20 summit was no landmark in world history, it reflected three important continuing shifts. One of them works to America’s advantage. The other two will be more challenging to navigate.
The first and, from an American standpoint, the most beneficial of these developments is the emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the U.S. The G-20 summit was a personal diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With both the Chinese and Russian leaders absent, Mr. Modi dominated center stage at a world gathering just weeks after India joined the elite club of countries that have landed probes on the moon.
India’s rise is overall a positive for America, but the second big trend is more difficult. China, Russia and some of their partners are stepping up their opposition to the American-led world order that has dominated global politics since World War II. One of their goals is to build an illiberal anti-American coalition in the Global South. Both Moscow and Beijing would like the growing group of countries known as BRICS+ to replace such meetings as the G-20 and the Group of Seven as the primary forums in world politics.
India has a different approach. Its critique of the global status quo shares some features with the Sino-Russian view, but ultimately India wants to reform, not demolish, the world system. As Russia moves closer to China, and as India’s fears about Beijing’s agenda grow, the competition between China and its allies and India and its supporters in the Global South will intensify.
The third trend, the accelerating decline in Europe’s global influence and reach, is more challenging still for the U.S. Observers have long warned that Europe’s slow economic growth, demographic decline, military weakness and unrealistic approach to world politics would constrain the Continent’s role in world affairs. One conclusion from New Delhi is that the long-deferred day of reckoning seems to have arrived.
This has been a year of disaster for Europe’s global standing. France has been largely expelled from a once-dominant position across much of Africa. Mr. Putin has revealed Europe’s impotence in Ukraine. The primary goal of Turkish foreign policy used to be joining the European Union. Today Turkey has largely turned its back on Europe, and European influence throughout the Middle East is in precipitous decline. China appears poised to challenge the German automobile industry. High European energy prices are hastening the continent’s deindustrialization.
Europe’s relative marginalization at the weekend summit reflected these developments. Mr. Modi and President Biden dominated the diplomatic action in New Delhi. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping both stayed home but had more impact on the agenda than the seven European leaders who attended in person.
For most of the world, the overrepresentation of Europeans in global institutions is the greatest flaw in the international architecture. The redistribution of global power and influence away from Europe to rising powers in Asia and elsewhere is, for most G-20 countries, the most important action item on the “global governance” agenda that the world faces today.
This is a problem for the Biden administration. On the one hand, working with India and other moderate states in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere requires the U.S. to support a sensible agenda of global reform that inevitably will reduce Europe’s role. Looking further ahead, to the extent that American policy makers genuinely care about a working global political and economic order, the survival of that system requires reforming it to reflect Europe’s declining clout.
Yet when it comes to outcomes rather than architecture, Europe is Team Biden’s closest global ally. It is the Europeans and for the most part only the Europeans who share the climate-change, human-rights, democracy and general wokeness goals at the heart of Mr. Biden’s global agenda. Most of the world’s rising powers are profoundly skeptical when it comes to the liberal policy goals that unite American Democrats and their European counterparts. As Europe’s voice in global institutions fades, the Biden administration’s chief goals will become much harder to achieve.
India rising, China and Russia seething, Europe shrinking and America dithering. The G-20 meeting in New Delhi changed little but revealed much.
13) David Whitehouse: Pyrenean caves reveal a warmer past
Net Zero Watch, 12 September 2023
Dr David Whitehouse, Science editor
The world’s high mountain regions are particularly sensitive to climate change. Straddling the border between France and Spain the Pyrenees occupy a crucial position in southern Europe, influenced by both Mediterranean and Atlantic climates. New research published in the journal ‘Climate of the Past,’ investigating climate proxy data based on stalagmites is revealing that past climates were warmer than our own.
This is the first climate reconstruction in the region based on speleothems over the past 2500 years. Previous reconstructions have been based on lake sediments, tree-rings and glaciers.Global surface temperatures in the first two decades of the 21st century (2001–2020) were 0.84 to 1.10°C warmer than 1850–1900 AD (IPCC, 2021).
According to the IPCC anthropogenic global warming is unprecedented in terms of absolute temperatures and spatial consistency over the past 2000 years. However, pre-industrial temperatures were less spatially coherent, and further work is needed to explain regional and natural climate change. Thus, according to the authors of the new study, “obtaining new and high-quality records in terms of resolution, dating and regional representativeness is thus critical for characterising natural climate variability on decadal to centennial scales.”
It is clear that the Pyrenees has followed the global trend. Their temperature has increased by more than 1.5 °C since 1882, as shown by the longest time series recorded at the Pic du Midi observatory. Recent studies confirm this warming trend, showing an increase of 0.1 °C per decade during the last century in the Central Pyrenees, or even 0.28°C per decade if only the 1959-2015 period is considered.
In addition, long-term snow depth observations (starting in 1955) show a statistically significant decline, especially at elevations above 2000 m. The glaciated area has decreased by 21.9% in the last decade from 2060 ha during the Little Ice Age (LIA) to 242 ha in 2016.
The new work has been carried out by researchers from seven nations and led by the Department of Geoenvironmental Processes and Global Change, Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Zaragoza (Spain). It presents a composite record of oxygen isotope variations during last 2500 years based on eight stalagmites from four caves in the central Pyrenees dominated by temperature variations, with precipitation playing a minor role.
Main climate drivers: Solar and volcanoes
The scientists find that the Roman Period (especially 0-200 AD), the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), and part of the Little Ice Age represent the warmest periods, while the coldest decades occurred during the Dark Ages and most of the LIA intervals (520-550 AD and 1800-1850 AD). Importantly, the LIA cooling or the MCA warming were not continuous or uniform and exhibited high decadal variability. The Industrial Era shows an overall warming trend although with marked cycles and partial stabilisation during the last two decades (1990-2010).
The researchers say that the strong coherence between the speleothem data, European temperature reconstructions and global tree-ring data means that the new data tells us about the nature of past climates importantly revealing that it is solar variability and major volcanic eruptions that appear to be the two main drivers of climate change in southwestern Europe during the past 2.5 millennia.
In summary: Over the past 2500 years it was the Roman Period that was the warmest. A cold period started around 300 AD with two particularly cold events in 500-650 and 750-850. The warm and dry Medieval Climatic Anomaly was well observed as well as the Little Ice Age. Cooling was observed during the Maunder Minimum and possibly the Dalton Minimum, both periods of low solar activity. Low temperatures started to increase around 1950 and the temperature increase since then is most notable in the past 2500 years.
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14) David Craig: The coming Eco-Totalitarianism
The Daily Sceptic, 11 September 2023
Refusal by the homeowner to comply with the UK Government’s Net Zero requirements would be a criminal offence with penalties of fines of up to £15,000 and imprisonment of up to one year. That a supposedly “Conservative” Government would use its parliamentary majority to introduce such intrusive and oppressive eco-totalitarianism is something that few of us would have imagined possible.
The Government’s plans to force Britain to achieve ‘Net Zero’ CO2 emissions by 2050 seem to be falling apart. Few people seem interested in buying expensive, range-limited electric vehicles. Even fewer want to replace their cheap efficient gas boilers with expensive and poor-performing heat pumps.
Offshore windfarms were a key part of our Government’s ‘Net Zero’ decarbonisation plans, yet there were no companies bidding for the recent group of offshore windfarm contracts. And our rulers seem unable to make up their minds about which technology to choose for Britain’s new generation of SMRs (small modular nuclear reactors) even though Rolls Royce has already developed a version which can work in the hostile underwater operating environment of nuclear-powered submarines and so could be quickly and inexpensively adapted for use on dry land.
However, having realised that it cannot provide sufficient electricity to power Britain as a supposed ‘renewable energy superpower’, the Government has come up with a brilliant solution – force us to use much less electricity.
I recently wrote an article for the Daily Sceptic explaining some of the more worrying aspects of the Energy Bill currently approved by a massive majority in the Commons and likely to be enthusiastically passed with a similar massive majority in the Lords.
In my article I quoted several sections from the Energy Bill. However, as these were written in almost incomprehensible legalese, I though it might be useful to describe three common scenarios which will arise once the Energy Bill has become law.
First, there is the replacement of existing electricity and gas meters. Our electricity and gas meters have a registered lifetime of anywhere between 10 and 25 years depending on the type of meter. Once a meter’s lifetime has expired, it should be replaced.
Under the terms of the Energy Bill, someone from your power supplier will have the right to enter your home to replace your current meter with a smart meter. If you refuse him entry or try to refuse having a smart meter installed, he can legally return with police back-up, force entry into your home and use what is called “reasonable force” to restrain you while he rips out your old-fashioned meter and replaces it with a smart meter. “Reasonable force” might just mean handcuffing you during the installation or could even mean detaining you in a cell at the local police station while your meters are changed.
Full post
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Bloomberg News: Western automakers are set to lose a fifth of their global market share due to the unstoppable rise of more-affordable, cheaper-to-produce Chinese electric vehicles, according to UBS analysts.
BYD, China’s biggest-selling auto brand, has a 25% cost advantage over North American and European brands, giving the Shenzhen-based company ample firepower to undercut rivals on their home turf as it expands globally.
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