https://mailchi.mp/769e4c43211e/cop28-hype-and-reality-199972?e=0b1369f9f8
Net Zero Samizdat
1) COP28’s historic deal cements a big role for Big Oil’s key priorities
Bloomberg, 13 December 2023
2) ‘Orderly’ transition, no phase-out and transitional fuels: COP text wins praise from oil companies
Upstream News, 13 December 2023
3) Benny Peiser: Reflections on COP28 – Energy Realism eclipses Climate Alarmism
ICSF/Clintel lecture, 13 December 2023
4) Editorial: The phony climate promises of COP28
The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2023
5) Matt Ridley: Hypocrisy is too feeble a word for the gulf between what world leaders preach at Cop28 and how much they still rely on fossil fuels
Daily Mail, 14 December 2023
6) Joe Oliver: COP28 was futile climate theatrics
Financial Post, 12 December 2023
7) Allison Pearson: It is morally wrong to blindly adhere to net zero – we must abandon it before it’s too late
The Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2023
8) Chris Mitchell: Journalists failing to report the unpalatable truths of energy and renewables
The Australian, 10 December 2023
9) Sabine Beppler-Spahl: Go green, go bankrupt?
Spiked, 13 December 2023
10) And finally: COP28 gets coal in its stocking
Robert Bryce, 12 December 2023
1) COP28’s historic deal cements a big role for Big Oil’s key priorities
Bloomberg, 13 December 2023
The historic COP28 deal, which committed the world to the transition away from fossil fuels, also cemented a role for two key oil industry priorities.
The summit’s final text indicated that natural gas, which is somewhat less carbon-intensive than oil and coal, can play a part in cutting emissions. It also placed CO2 capture and storage alongside renewables and nuclear as key technologies that would drive the transition.
These are areas where Big Oil has been making multibillion dollar bets, and whether they truly complement, or eventually undercut, the pledge for a lower-carbon world is still open to debate. For natural gas it’s largely a question of timing, and for CCS it’s a matter of technological progress.
“We are not going to win the fight against the climate change if we continue to rely structurally on fossil fuels,” said Tinne Van der Straeten, the energy minister for Belgium which still relies on gas for almost a quarter of its electricity production. “Gas as a transition fuel means that you use it as short as possible.”
Gas has been heralded by the industry as the cleanest fossil fuel since it releases less carbon dioxide than coal when combusted. However, in many regions it’s also responsible for rampant methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than CO2. The COP28 text included a pledge to reduce methane pollution to near zero by the end of decade, and has been widely endorsed by the fossil fuel industry.
Before the deal, there was already a long-running debate about the role of natural gas in the shift to clean energy. Corporate giants including Shell Plc and Woodside Energy Group Ltd. insist it has a role in providing secure long-term fuel supplies. They are making big investments in new projects to pump gas, which for many companies represents a growing share of their overall fossil fuel production.
The fossil fuel industry had a big presence at the Dubai climate conference. The president of this year’s UN-sponsored summit, the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Al Jaber, also runs the country’s oil company. He brokered an agreement that kept keeping Saudi Arabia and other oil producers on board. Major CEOs including Darren Woods of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Toby Rice of EQT Corp. were also in attendance.
Some governments, such as Japan’s, also say that additional investment in gas is necessary to boost energy security, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year sent prices of the fuel to a record high. Firms in Europe and Asia signed 27-year liquefied natural gas purchase agreements with Qatar over the last year. Critics argue that this threatens 2050 net zero targets.
Proponents argue that CCS could help preserve the energy security of fossil fuels without the emissions. Critics say it’s unproven at scale and a convenient fig leaf for Big Oil.
The technology to capture and store CO2 is something oil companies have been employing for decades, mostly pumping the trapped gas back into the ground to extract more fossil fuel. Today, there’s increasing interest in using CCS to reduce the carbon intensity of products, such as cement and steel, and even suck CO2 directly out of the air.
Yet the large-scale economic viability of the technique remains unproven. For decades, the US has dedicated billions of dollars in federal government spending — both grants and tax credits — to propel carbon capture ventures at power plants and industrial facilities, but it has little to show for that largesse. Just 14 projects are operating today, with half of them tied to the very cheapest applications — gas processing and ethanol production — according to a database by the non-governmental organization Clean Air Task Force.
2) ‘Orderly’ transition, no phase-out and transitional fuels: COP text wins praise from oil companies
Upstream News, 13 December 2023
Industry bags series of wins as resolution highlights role of gas and carbon capture but stops short of calling for fossil fuel phase-out
Oil and gas companies responded positively to the outcome of the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, as the final text of the resolution included notable mentions for so-called transition fuels such as natural gas and abating technologies including carbon capture.
After the publication of the resolution of the Dubai conference was pushed back a day, and talks went on through the night, the United Arab Emirates-led COP presidency announced the text on Wednesday morning.
3) Benny Peiser: Reflections on COP28 – Energy Realism eclipses Climate Alarmism
ICSF/Clintel lecture, 13 December 2023
“For the first time that I can remember, this COP has given a rubber stamp for fossil fuels. That’s because the deal agreed, and I quote: “Transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” The COP has recognised the role of ‘transitional fuels.’ But what are transitional fuels? Well, the Chinese will say that coal is a transitional fuel because we are transitioning away from coal. The Gulf states will say that gas is a transitional fuel because it’s a bridge to the future. And the Saudis will say oil is a transitional fuel because we need a bridge to transition from conventional to electric cars.”
Benny Peiser provides insights on the geopolitics and political wrangling characteristic of the current COP28, and analyses the deepening divide between climate alarmism and energy realism. He reviews the evidence for the decline of the climate agenda which is being overtaken by mounting concerns about the economic, political and social costs of radical climate policies. He demonstrates how the West’s climate policies are now being openly challenged by massive investment in fossil-fuelled energy generation in China, India and much of the developing nations in Asia and Africa. He concludes that this new energy realism opens the door for more pragmatic climate policies which offer significant economic, social and environmental benefits….
4) Editorial: The phony climate promises of COP28
The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2023
Don’t believe the hype that governments are phasing out fossil fuels. The deal they agreed to has all the force and idealism of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war.
The COP28 climate confab in Dubai didn’t end with white smoke on Wednesday, but Biden climate envoy John Kerry is nonetheless singing hallelujah after nearly 200 countries agreed to “transition” from fossil fuels. The point of the deal is to preserve the West’s illusion that its climate policies are accomplishing something.
China and oil-producing countries refused to sign onto an agreement committing to “phase out” fossil fuels. But Mr. Kerry and European leaders insisted that governments at the United Nations summit demonstrate a common purpose to reduce CO2 emissions.
The deal they agreed to has all the force and idealism of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war. The deal calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.”
This “just transition” isn’t defined and isn’t binding on governments. It won’t stop China from building more coal plants or the United Arab Emirates from drilling more oil. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries projects that oil demand will grow 10.6% between 2022 and 2028, and nothing in the agreement is likely to change that forecast.
The deal calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity by 2030, but countries will still need fossil fuels to back up solar and wind. Renewables generate only about 20% to 40% of their stated capacity compared to 80% to 90% for fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants. That means a tripling of renewable energy capacity will result in a much smaller increase in actual power generation.
This explains why, as we noted last week, China is building massive coal plants even as it boasts about its growth in solar and wind. China is expected to add 95 to 120 gigawatts of solar power capacity this year—about as much coal power as it approved last year. But coal plants will produce power (and CO2 emissions) around the clock while solar farms won’t.
Nonetheless, the U.N. press release says the agreement signals the “beginning of the end” of the fossil-fuel era. That’s what Biden officials and European leaders will tell voters to justify their policies that raise the cost of energy and reduce consumer choice. They want their citizens to believe that they aren’t alone in banishing fossil fuels, even though they are.
The climate lobby’s plan was to use global agreements to browbeat democracies into committing to a net-zero transition before voters caught onto the costs and lifestyle impacts. The plan failed. Europeans are revolting against climate policies as fuel and electricity prices soar, causing Europe and the United Kingdom to backtrack on their gas-powered car bans.
The COP28 agreement, weak as it is, reflects the arrogance of global elites who are ignoring what electorates are saying about the costs they are willing to pay. Elites have turned to government mandates and vast subsidies—i.e., coercion—because they can’t persuade voters that the climate benefits from reducing CO2 emissions justify the social and economic costs.
China and developing countries certainly don’t believe this, and they are refusing to make economic sacrifices for what the left claims is the global climate good. So why is President Biden forcing Americans to do so?
5) Matt Ridley: Hypocrisy is too feeble a word for the gulf between what world leaders preach at Cop28 and how much they still rely on fossil fuels
Daily Mail, 14 December 2023
As for predictable, do they take us for fools? After 27 previous Cop conferences we knew how this pantomime in Dubai would go.
Breakthrough! Deep into their umpteenth sleepless night of hard bargaining, the delegates at the Cop28 meeting in Dubai managed to upgrade a verb in their final deal.
Instead of saying nations ‘could’ take action, the agreement ‘calls on’ them to take action. Incredible! Cue rapturous applause and a standing ovation as representatives from 197 countries approved the historic ‘UAE Consensus’ on climate change.
‘There’s stronger verb forms but I think it does send a strong signal nonetheless,’ crowed a delegate from the World Resources Institute.
This verb miracle — alongside language about ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems [electricity, heating, transport and industry] in a just, orderly and equitable manner’ — is as futile as it was predictable. It’s futile because it will lead to the cancellation of precisely zero coal-fired power stations or oil-exploration plans.
China and India, despite spouting the Cop catechism, are between them approving the equivalent of a new coal plant every two or three days.
In America, which led calls to transition away from fossil fuels, oil and gas production has never been higher: it now produces far more oil than Saudi Arabia. Brazil — while demanding the phasing out of fossil fuels — plans to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2030.
Hypocrisy is too feeble a word for this gap between preaching and practice.
As for predictable, do they take us for fools? After 27 previous Cop conferences we knew how this pantomime in Dubai would go.
As surely as night follows day, 98,000 gas-guzzling delegates, many of them arriving by private jet, would engage in a fortnight-long ordeal of hotel room service and then issue dire warnings of a breakdown. As expected, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations would be reluctant to commit to the phase-out of fossil fuels. Yet, after a long night of haggling, a bleary-eyed announcement of a triumph would be greeted with hyperbole by an emotional BBC reporter. For the 28th time.
Remember that at Cop17 in Durban 12 years ago, world leaders agreed that by 2015 they would sign a legally binding treaty — not a voluntary one — to reduce emissions, which would apply to the whole world and come into force by 2020. Yet, at Cop21 in 2015 in Paris they decided instead to present as a great breakthrough a series of entirely voluntary and empty national promises, few of which have ever been implemented.
At the time I pointed this failure out in the House of Lords, saying that Paris therefore represented the end of a 20-year attempt to get agreement to legally binding emissions targets, leaving Britain as the only country with such a target.
For this sin of criticising the agreement, thereby raining on his parade, the minister — a colleague from my own party — chose to liken me to North Korea, the only state to stand apart from the Cop deal. Eight years on, the statistics on continually rising emissions show I was right and he was wrong.
So yesterday I celebrated the news of the breakthrough on verbs in Dubai by choosing a second-hand diesel car to replace my existing one. No, I am not being cynical: the data is clear that my emissions of carbon dioxide will be lower that way than if I had chosen a battery-electric vehicle.
According to Volkswagen’s calculations, in a typical European country such is the up-front carbon footprint of batteries and electricity that I would have to drive an electric car 80,000 miles before I would even start to save emissions, compared with an existing diesel — let alone one of the more efficient new ones. And I tend to trade in cars at 50,000 miles. So I am doing my bit by not buying electric.
In the year 2000, according to the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy, 84 per cent of the world’s primary energy came from fossil fuels. Last year, after 23 years of transitioning away from fossil fuels — and 27 interminable Cop conferences since 1995 — that number was… 82 per cent. At this rate it will take us till the year 3909AD to give up fossil fuels. No wonder a large chunk of the population thinks these talks are futile nonsense.
6) Joe Oliver: COP28 was futile climate theatrics
Financial Post, 12 December 2023
Delegates debated the phase-out of fossil fuels without, as usual, any serious discussion of costs
COP28, the 28th “Conference of the Parties,” the annual summit of climate-change catastrophists, spent much of its time debating the schedule for a fossil fuel phase-out. Its mission is to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050 compared to the start of the industrial age — which coincided with the end of the Little Ice Age, so temperature increases since then have been both natural and man-made. Held in the shopaholic’s paradise of Dubai, it attracted 84,000 registrants, double last year’s number, among them no fewer than 720 from Canada.
One iconic personality is a no-show. The Joan of Arc of alarmist hyperbole, Greta Thunberg, refused to attend because civil protests are discouraged in the United Arab Emirates. In her debut on the COP scene in 2019, in the guise of a child prophet, she prophesied impending disaster brought on by people’s wastrel behaviour. The quasi-religious role helps explain why a 16-year-old was invited to address the United Nations and why, in private meetings, she hectored political leaders, including our own prime minister. Now 20 years old, she presents as left-wing radical heir to a wealthy Swedish family and chants “crush Zionism” at rallies where she bizarrely tries to tie the climate movement to Palestinians.
In spite of her ministrations and those of King Charles, Al Gore, Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio and other grand panjandrums, the 27 preceding COPs have had no discernible influence on the climate. Atmospheric CO2 continues to rise steadily, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Although COVID-19 reduced industrial carbon dioxide temporarily, it did not detectably impact carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Nor is any resource-rich country meeting its zero emissions targets, while the largest developing countries are moving aggressively in exactly the opposite direction in order to deliver affordable energy to their needy citizens. World energy consumption has tripled in the past 50 years and fossil fuels provided 81 per cent of global energy consumption in 2021, the same as in 1999. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, global CO2 emissions from consumption of coal, liquid fuels and natural gas will increase over the next 30 years. So much for net-zero by 2050 since offsets will not be able to keep pace. How many trees can we plant?
I did not think I would ever quote a COP participant approvingly, given their penchant for unhinged lamentation. But COP28’s president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, said in the run-up to the meetings that there is no science indicating a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to limit global heating to 1.5C. He also said eliminating fossil fuels would take the world back into caves. Confronting groupthink with reality did not go over well with COP devotees, who claimed their host sounded like a denier.
7) Allison Pearson: It is morally wrong to blindly adhere to net zero – we must abandon it before it’s too late
The Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2023
At Cop28, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was right to call out delusional Western leaders with their pie-in-the-sky nonsense
[…] It may seem a bit of a leap from Sustainability Cheryl to Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister, but please bear with me. The prince caused quite a kerfuffle at Cop28, that gathering in Dubai of the great and the green, when he refused to agree to a “phasedown/phase-out out” of oil, which delegates were expected to agree on by yesterday. (As I write, agreement still seems elusive. All 198 countries at the summit have to decide the final Cop28 deal and many are furious that the draft allowed countries to merely “consider reducing fossil fuel use”.)
Addressing the putative phase-out of oil, the prince said coolly, “I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that. I would like to put that challenge to all of those who… come out publicly saying we have to [phase down oil]. I’ll give you their name and number, call them and ask them how they are gonna do that. If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Saudi’s vast wealth does rather depend on oil not being phased out. Nonetheless, the prince’s defiant challenge to the Caroline Lucas, weave-your-own-hairshirt brigade was arresting, as was his attempt to call the industrialised West’s bluff on the practicalities of achieving net zero.
Even more embarrassing for the global green “consensus” was the actual president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, when he responded curtly to Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change. “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone… and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel,” said Robinson. “That is the one decision that Cop28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of ADNOC (United Arab Emirates’ state oil company), you could actually take it with more credibility.”
Al Jaber replied: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C [limiting global warming to well below 2C]. Please help me,” the sultan continued, “show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Put that in your renewable wind turbine and don’t smoke it!
Al Jaber later softened his stance at a hastily arranged press conference. “I respect the science… I have repeatedly said that it is the science that has guided the principles or strategy as Cop28 president.” Still, his earlier remarks were extremely revealing, a sign of determined pushback from those countries who know we will need fossil fuels to maintain a certain standard of living for the foreseeable future and, what’s more, are increasingly prepared to say so. Plus, if Al Jaber is causing Al Gore to have a meltdown on Twitter (now X) then I reckon he must be doing something right.
“Cop28 is on the verge of failure,” thundered Gore, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work disseminating knowledge about man-made climate change. “The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft (agreement) reads as if OPEC dictated it… There are 24 hours left to show whose side the world is on: the side that wants to protect humanity’s future by kickstarting the orderly phase-out of fossil fuel or the side of the petrostates and the oil and gas companies that are fuelling the historic climate catastrophe.”
I could devote a whole column to Gore’s putrid green double-standards. The former US vice president claims to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle “to the maximum extent possible”, although according to the National Center for Public Policy Research, Gore’s 10,000 square foot Tennessee mansion guzzles more electricity in 12 months than the average American family uses in 21 years (something Gore has disputed, claiming offsetting).
But Hunt the Eco-hypocrite is like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of the climate-change preachers, who legislate privations on the masses, are happy to give up anything. So long as it’s not their private jet.
What sticks in the craw is their claim that they alone are on the side of humanity. On the contrary, their project to save the planet spells a painful reduction in comfort and joy for millions. Politicians like Labour’s Ed Miliband who talk blithely about reaching the target of net zero by 2050 are either a) too thick to understand what’s involved or b) lying.
Last week, I was lucky enough to interview Michael Kelly, emeritus professor of engineering at Cambridge University and fellow of the Royal Society, for the Planet Normal podcast. The transition from fossil fuels would, he said, be “the biggest engineering project undertaken in British history” – and we are nowhere near ready for what amounts to the Industrial Revolution on steroids.
Prof Kelly has published a devastating, jaw-dropping paper called Achieving Net Zero: A Report from a Putative Delivery Agency. Because the British government has singularly failed to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2050 (sound familiar?), Prof Kelly decided to imagine that he’d been appointed CEO of a new agency with the explicit goal of meeting that target.
Among his horrifying conclusions: the cost of the UK reaching net zero by 2050 will comfortably exceed £3 trillion (at least £180,000 for every household), a workforce comparable to the entire NHS will be required for 30 years, including a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers. The country would effectively have to “go on a war footing and a command economy will be essential, as major cuts to other forms of expenditure, such as health, education and defence. will be needed”. The electricity supply will have to increase by about 67 per cent in order to maintain transport at today’s level. The national grid needs to be 2.7 times bigger in 2050 than it is currently if the UK economy as we know it now is to continue to function. That is eight times the rate at which new capacity has been added over the past 30 years, including all the renewables to date.
Oh, and every home in the country will have to be rewired, plus all street distribution and local sub-stations. It has been estimated it will cost £700 billion to carry out this work, and we don’t have the manpower to do it. Without that spending, we will have to live with frequent circuit breaks, and suboptimal performance of domestic appliances. Folks, do your washing at 3am and buy a battery-powered torch for the blackouts.
If this sounds mad it’s because it is mad. To use Prof Kelly’s starkest image, if we take the cost of HS2 now as being about £100 billion, then achieving net zero will require 36 HS2s or more than one a year until 2050. You may recall, we tried to deliver just one HS2. And failed.
The struggle to reach agreement at Cop28 is a harbinger of growing international resistance to this folly. Now is the time for a complete rethink on net zero. It is morally wrong to stubbornly adhere to a goal which will cost trillions of pounds, and isn’t even achievable. Not in the timeframe. The damage to peoples’ lives from this misguided target will be incalculable, and civil unrest a likely consequence. We need to start again with proper cost-benefit analyses. Engineers of the calibre of Prof Kelly should be given the task of working out what is feasible with a longer horizon, and be free to express their honest view. The Climate Change Committee, which exerts a powerful hold over the thinking of clueless MPs, should be scrapped. Enough with the Green grandstanding.
Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was right to call out delusional Western leaders with their Just Stop Oil nonsense. (“Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.” Quite.) It would mean living without plastics, without appliances, without most clothing. Much of the twinkly joy of Christmas would be lost, along with the sparkly wrappers of Quality Street. I don’t want to live in that dreary, dark world, and nor do most people.
At Cop28, there are many who are convinced that we face a climate catastrophe in the next few decades if net zero is not delivered. Well, I say we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050. Humanity cannot bear it.
8) Chris Mitchell: Journalists failing to report the unpalatable truths of energy and renewables
The Australian, 10 December 2023
The failure of some journalists to report what is really happening globally in fossil fuel consumption and renewable energy generation is a scandal.
Why did so few environment reporters even mention the most important story in the lead-up to the COP28 conference being held in Dubai?
On November 30, the US Energy Information Administration reported global CO2 emissions would rise by up to 34 per cent between now and 2050. Its most optimistic estimate was a fall of less than 2 per cent.
Coal use would rise in electricity generation, particularly in India. Natural gas use in power generation would rise globally, as it would in chemical production.
The US would remain the biggest gas user while Middle East gas consumption would rise between 29 and 54 per cent between 2022 and 2050. Liquid fuel consumption would continue to rise until 2050.
Thank God our ABC 7.30 was able to confirm with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last Thursday week that Australia is on track to reduce emissions by 42 per cent by 2030.
With 1.1 per cent of global emissions, that will really make a difference. Not.
In various lead-up statements to the COP, senior ministers from Oman, Saudi Arabia, China and India all cast doubts on the global push to end fossil fuel use. Apart from Guardian Australia, much of the left media ignored those statements.
COP28 host country the United Arab Emirates has announced its state-owned oil firm, Adnoc, will increase oil output by 7 per cent over the next four years. The BBC reported last Monday that by 2050, UAE would still be producing 850 million barrels of oil per year, down slightly from its present 1 billion barrels annually.
COP president, UAE’s Sultan Al-Jaber, head of Adnoc, even claimed there was no science to prove a phase-out of oil was needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.
The Guardian on December 3 reported Al-Jaber saying a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back to the caves”.
Reuters on December 5 reported work from the independent data consortium Net Zero Tracker, which includes Oxford University. It shows that 69 of the world’s oil producers have pledged to reach net zero emissions but “only Denmark, Spain and France have set out plans to eventually stop drilling”.
While climate writers here often discuss expanding renewable power generation in India and China, the unarguable truth is both countries are increasing construction of coal-fired power plants and expanding their domestic thermal coal production.
India is now the world’s No. 3 emitter. Its Minister for Power, R. K. Singh, said on November 6: “Our point of view is that we are not going to compromise with the availability of power for growth.”
S & P Global reported on November 29 that India was generating 149.66 terawatt hours of electricity by the end of September, 73 per cent of it from coal. That figure would rise to 77 per cent by 2025 before falling to “71 per cent in 2030 and 52 per cent by 2050”. S & P said public power companies were building 27 gigawatts of extra thermal power, almost all coal. It quoted Singh saying that would need to rise to an extra 80gW.
China, recovering from Covid lockdowns, plans to lift coal and gas power production. OilPrice.com says China expects peak winter power demand this year to rise by 12.1 per cent, or 140gW.
During the first half of 2023, OilPrice says, China approved more than 50gW of new coal power, expanded domestic coal output by 3 per cent and lifted gas imports by 11 per cent.
So if the world is struggling to wean itself off fossil fuels, how is the transition to renewables going? It’s going well for China, which makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, but the prognosis is not so good in Europe and the US.
9) Sabine Beppler-Spahl: Go green, go bankrupt?
Spiked, 13 December 2023
Germany’s promise of a ‘green economic miracle’ has turned into a devastating budget crisis.
The German government’s green agenda could be in serious trouble.
In November, Germany’s supreme court declared that it would be unlawful for the government to use emergency Covid-19 funds to pay for its transition to Net Zero. This prompted the coalition to announce last week that it may not be able to produce a 2024 budget by the end of this year. Public spending for the rest of 2023 has been frozen.
There is now a chance that the 2024 budget may indeed be ready this week. But the fiasco has nonetheless been deeply embarrassing for chancellor Olaf Scholz. The supreme court ruling has made a mockery of Scholz’s promise to spend billions on new ecological projects to support Germany’s flailing economy. Earlier this year, Scholz was claiming that Germany would experience an economic miracle fuelled by investment in new wind turbines, electricity grids, hydrogen power and subsidies for chip and battery production. That has now been exposed as just so much hot air.
This budget crisis poses huge problems for the government and its Net Zero agenda. Back in 2022, the coalition had intended to plug a €60 billion gap in the budget with funds that had been set aside to deal with the cost of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns. This €60 billion was to be repurposed to cover part of the immense costs of its green-energy transition plan. Doing so would have allowed the government to pretend that the Net Zero transition would place no additional burden on the taxpayer, and therefore dodge any parliamentary and public debate about its green policies.
It’s hardly surprising that the government’s budgetary trick has now been ruled unconstitutional. One reason the court gave is that emergency funds must be used for the purpose they were set up for. Another is that the ‘special budget’ is incompatible with Germany’s ‘debt brake rule’ (Schuldenbremse), which caps fiscal deficits at 0.35 per cent of GDP per year.
It is ironic that the German government should fall foul of the very rule that once seemed to demonstrate Germany’s fiscal prudence. The debt-brake rule was passed by parliament in 2009, at the height of the financial and euro debt crisis. At that time, it served as a model for the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), which has been used against the Eurozone’s supposedly reckless spenders. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel (who some referred to as the ‘Swabian housewife’ because of her alleged budgetary discipline) became the face of the harsh austerity measures imposed on countries like Greece.
A lot has changed since then. Germany is now in a recession and its economy has been contracting. Rhetorically, the government is committed to the idea of a restrained budget, but behind the scenes it has been borrowing huge amounts. The aforementioned €60 billion was only a small portion of the money that would be needed for the transition to green energy. The coalition had planned plenty of other ‘special funds’, such as a fund to help offset the effects of rising energy costs, which are now set to be phased out due to the court ruling.
The longer the budget crisis is drawn out, the weaker Germany will become. The impact of this will be felt not just within Germany itself, but also in Brussels. The EU is pursuing its own expensive Net Zero agenda and has increased its financial demands on member states, especially on Germany, the bloc’s largest contributor. Just last week, Germany announced that it would not support the EU Commission’s request for an additional €50 billion to deal with migration and other projects. This represents a massive financial setback for the EU.
German voters should see the budget crisis as a chance to reckon with the political elite’s green ideology. Not only has the crisis demonstrated the true cost of Net Zero; it has also exposed the coalition’s disregard for democracy. It’s time the German government’s green plans were properly held to account.
10) And finally: COP28 gets coal in its stocking
Robert Bryce, 12 December 2023
Two weeks before Christmas, the Dubai climate confab ends with a thud as global coal demand continues to increase
Last week, during the COP28 meeting in Dubai, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said, “There shouldn’t be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world.”
China, India, and a bunch of other countries didn’t get that memo.
While the backdrop to the meeting in Dubai was oil (the United Arab Emirates is a member of OPEC and exports about 2.7 million barrels of oil per day), the hydrocarbon looming over COP28 was coal. Yes, there was some promising news out of Dubai, including a long-overdue pledge by 22 nations to triple the amount of nuclear energy capacity by 2050. But the meeting will end without an agreement to “phase out” hydrocarbons. Coal didn’t have many friends at COP28, but it continues to be an indispensable fuel for generating electricity. That means it’s going stick around. That’s true in Asia and Europe. It’s also true here in the United States. (More on that in a moment.)
In July, the International Energy Agency predicted global coal use will set another new record of about 8.4 billion tons this year. The agency also predicted coal consumption will remain at or above that level in 2024. “China will continue to account for more than half of the world’s coal use, with the power sector alone consuming one-third,” said the IEA. “If we add India, the global share rises to about 70%, meaning that China and India together consume double the amount of coal as the rest of the world combined.”
On November 27, three days before the opening of the meeting in Dubai, Global Energy Monitor released a report showing that some 204,000 megawatts of new coal-fired capacity is now under construction around the world. Of that 204,000 MW, about 67% is in China. To put that massive amount of new capacity in perspective, the U.S. currently operates about 205,000 MW of coal-fired power plants. (The generating capacity of the entire U.S. grid is about 1.3 terawatts, or 1.3 million MW.) In addition to the huge amount now being built, another 353,000 MW of coal-fired capacity has been announced, pre-permitted, or permitted. Of that 353,000 MW in the queue, about 72% is in China.
While Kerry and others like to deride coal, the alt-energy technologies being heavily subsidized by Western countries are helping fuel the growth of Asia’s coal-fired capacity. From Indonesian nickel needed to build electric vehicles to Chinese solar panels, the “energy transition” is stoking demand for industrial electricity in Asia. And the overwhelming majority of that new demand is being met by coal-fired power plants.
