https://mailchi.mp/a9c5a4e027e3/net-zero-rollback-in-full-swing-200752?e=0b1369f9f8

Net Zero Samizdat 

 

 

1) Labour to ditch £28bn annual green investment pledge, party sources say
The Guardian, 1 February 2024

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reevs are ditching Labour’s flagship policy pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment, party sources have said.

The sources said the party would keep the core mission of investing in green infrastructure, as well as already announced plans such as the creation of GB Energy, a publicly owned clean energy company, and a mass home insulation programme.

But it will in effect cut its green ambitions by about two-thirds, given that the previously announced schemes are set to cost just under £10bn a year by the end of the parliament.

The change, after a spate of recent government attacks portraying the £28bn figure as a likely tax rise, has been pushed for by key figures around Starmer including Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s director of campaigns, and Pat McFadden, the party’s campaigns coordinator.

In a series of media interviews after speeches by Reeves and Starmer to a conference in London attended by hundreds of business executives, the shadow chancellor was repeatedly asked about the £28bn figure and declined each time to back it.

Asked 10 times during an interview with Sky News, Reeves said of the plan: “I think what people need to know is that the fiscal rules are the most important thing for me … I know the importance of economic and fiscal stability and that will always come first.”

One shadow minister said: “The £28bn is definitely going as a figure. It will be changed to specific outcomes linked to specific investment, rather than being a random figure to be allocated at a later date.”

In a sign of how Starmer is likely to frame the decision, the source added: “It was always meant to be formally allocated before the general election, so this isn’t such a major departure really. It’s being firmed up, not dropped.”

While scaling back the green prosperity plan has been under consideration for some weeks, dropping the £28bn annual target, unveiled with great fanfare by Reeves at the Labour conference in 2021, would be politically risky for Starmer and his team.

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2) EU to delay new green rule in bid to appease protesting farmers
The Guardian, 31 January 2024

Farmers protesting across Europe have won their first concession from Brussels, with the EU announcing a delay in rules that would have forced them to set aside land to encourage biodiversity and soil health.

About 10,000 French farmers stepped up their protests on Wednesday, with at least 100 blockades on major roads across France, as 18 farmers were arrested for blocking traffic as they tried to reach the wholesale food market at Rungis, south-east of Paris and 79 others were detained after they managed to get inside.

Belgian farmers joined protests at the French border and others blocked access roads to the Zeebrugge container port for a second day. Spanish and Italian farmers also demonstrated.

The European Commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, described Wednesday’s decision to delay rules on setting aside land, which is expected to be rubber-stamped by member states within 15 days, as “a helping hand” for the sector at a difficult time.

Citing flooding, wildfires in Greece, heatwaves across southern Europe and drought in Spain which has left reservoirs in Andalucia at 20% normal levels, he said it was important to listen to farmers and “to avoid the polarisation which is making any good conversation and discussion more difficult.

“We feel we are obliged to act under this pressure which the farming community [is feeling],” he said. “We have had a number of extreme meteorological events, droughts, flooding in various parts of Europe, and there was a clear negative effect on the output, on the revenue – and of course, decreased income – for the farmers.”

Combined with higher energy prices, the weather-related risks to crops meant farmers were at a “persistent pain point” that was “driving up the cost of production and squeezing revenues”, Šefčovič said.

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3) Europe’s solar panel manufacturers ask EU for emergency support
Reuters, 30 January 2024

BRUSSELS, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Europe’s solar panel manufacturing industry has urged the European Union to step in with emergency measures to avoid local firms shutting down under price pressure from Chinese imports, a letter seen by Reuters showed.

Multiple European solar manufacturers have announced plans to close factories in recent months, citing pressure from a flood of imports and an oversupply of solar panel parts that have piled up in European warehouses and pushed down prices.

In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, industry group the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) warned that without rapid help, the EU risked losing more than half of its operational solar photovoltaic module manufacturing capacity within weeks.

“Over the next 4–8 weeks, major EU PV module producers and their European suppliers are poised to shut down manufacturing lines unless substantial emergency measures are promptly implemented,” said the letter, dated Jan. 30.

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4) EU’s looming green election backlash – here’s what to expect
EurActiv, 31 January 2024

Over the past weeks, several European political parties have circulated draft versions of their manifestos for the upcoming EU elections between 6-9 June. Euractiv walks you through the potential implications for energy and environment policy.

In short, all signs point to a right-wing turn after the Green Wave of the last EU election in 2019.

EPP: Economy first, environment last. Most significant is the draft manifesto of the European People’s Party (EPP), which brings together centre-right and conservative parties from across Europe.

Latest opinion polls show the EPP will keep their top spot in the European Parliament after the elections – albeit by a smaller margin, with 23.5% of the votes and 178 seats, down from 182 currently – making them the biggest group in the EU assembly and the most likely to choose the next European Commission president.

So, what’s their programme? The EPP’s draft manifesto, obtained by Euractiv, is marked by the near absence of environmental policy. The word appears only four times in the 14-page document, and when it does, it is framed in the context of Europe’s economic rivalry with competitors like China and the US.

“Economic prosperity, ambitious environmental protection and social peace can only succeed in Europe if our economy is also successful worldwide. This is why competitiveness is so crucial,” the EPP manifesto says. Max Griera has the story.

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5) Volvo pulls the plug on its electric car brand
The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2024

Polestar remains stuck in the red as battery-powered vehicles lose their illustrious shine

To hear him speak, you would think Volvo Cars’ Scottish chief executive Jim Rowan is very much an electric vehicle crusader.

Standing beside the company’s new EX30 as he unveiled the Swedish carmaker’s full-year results on Thursday, Rowan said Volvo was leading “a paradigm shift for us and for our entire industry”, boasting that only Tesla had stronger profit margins on sales of electric cars.

But that enthusiasm apparently no longer extends to Polestar, Volvo’s dedicated electric marque.

On Thursday, Volvo said it would no longer provide financial support to Polestar and would look at offloading some of its 48pc stake in the company to other shareholders, including China’s Geely. (Most of the rest of Polestar is already owned by Geely chairman Eric Li.)

The news is the latest blow to Polestar, an early mover in electric cars that has struggled to keep up with premium rivals such as Tesla and which remains heavily loss-making despite its cars receiving critical acclaim.

It is also the latest rupture in the electric vehicle industry. Battery-powered cars were once predicted to dominate the vehicle market by the end of this decade, but their sense of inevitability has faded in recent months as sales slow and as targets have been pushed back.

Electric vehicle (EV) sales are expected to decline for the first time in seven years in 2024 in Germany, Europe’s biggest car market, and Renault earlier this week scrapped plans to spin-off its EV unit, Ampere, blaming a lack of strong interest from investors and a slowdown in sales.

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6) UK Regulator probes wind power overstatement
Bloomberg, 1 February 2024

The probe followed a report that many wind farms have saddled consumers with millions in extra costs by overestimating the energy they planned to generate. 

The UK energy regulator Ofgem is investigating the behavior of wind farms that have been overstating how much power they will produce.

The probe follows a Bloomberg News report earlier Thursday which found that dozens of wind farms, many run by some of Europe’s largest energy companies, have saddled consumers with millions in extra costs by routinely overestimating the energy they planned to generate.

“Ofgem’s wholesale markets oversight team are investigating the alleged behavior,” a spokesman said in an emailed statement, adding that the regulator had also asked National Grid Plc’s network operator to look into the matter. “We will continue to work to protect market integrity and consumers.”

The UK’s outdated grid often can’t handle all the electricity that wind farms produce. When that happens, the system operator often pays operators to switch their turbines off. Payments for this “curtailment” are based on what wind farms predict they will generate — and some operators exaggerate their forecasts, which boosts what they receive, according to nine traders, academics and market experts.

Bloomberg analyzed 30 million records from 2018 through June 2023 to compare wind operators’ daily forecasts of the energy they planned to generate to their actual production when they weren’t curtailed. Out of 121 wind farms in the analysis, 40 overstated their output by 10% or more on average, and 27 of those overestimated by at least 20%.

Read more: Wind Farms Overstate Their Output — And Consumers Pay For It

7) Fraser Myers: Europe’s farmers are right to rise up against our eco-obsessed elites
Spiked, 30 January 2024

A ‘siege of Paris’ is underway. Since Monday, thousands of tractors, trailers and combine harvesters have encircled the French capital, blocking key motorways in and out of the city. Roads around Lyon, Limoges and Toulouse have also been brought to a standstill by furious farmers.

French farmers have joined the Europe-wide fightback against the green agenda. In the Netherlands, farmers have been revolting for several years against their governments’ stringent restrictions on nitrogen emissions. A policy which, according to the Dutch government’s own figures, could lead to the closure of around 3,000 farms. In Ireland, farmers have risen up over green proposals to cull over 200,000 cows. In Germany, thousands of tractors descended on Berlin earlier this month, protesting against cuts to farm subsidies, tax hikes on diesel fuel and a raft of green rules that have made farmers’ lives intolerable.

Certainly, farmers in each of these countries have their own specific grievances. Every European government has proposed its own intrusive regulations or onerous tax hikes. But these are overwhelmingly driven by a common goal: to turn agriculture into a ‘Net Zero’ industry. And for EU member states, this lofty green goal is not a choice – it is a requirement of the EU’s so-called Green Deal.

These protests have quickly forced governments to sit up and listen. After just one day of the siege of Paris, the French government offered an array of concessions to the farming sector. New prime minister Gabriel Attal has abandoned a planned hike in diesel-fuel taxes for agricultural vehicles and has pledged millions of euros in grants for organic farms. He has promised to cut some red tape. And he has threatened to fine supermarkets that fail to offer producers a fair price for their wares. But none of this has been enough. Because as every farmer now knows, no amount of subsidies or tax breaks can disguise the coming catastrophe of Net Zero. A demented goal that no government seems prepared to abandon.

The root of many of the most damaging climate measures is the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, which is itself a key plank of the EU Green Deal. It calls for 10 per cent of agricultural land to be set aside for non-farming use. It says that at least 25 per cent of EU farms should be organic. It demands a 20 per cent reduction in fertiliser use. And it insists that the use of pesticides must fall by 50 per cent. All by 2030.

The severity of these measures is hard to overstate. They will drastically cut the amount of food farmers can produce. They will render many farms unviable. But rather than challenge these impossibly stringent rules, most national governments have supplemented them with their own green regulations.

‘[The Green Deal] is a totally disconnected project’, Thierry Coué, deputy general secretary of the FNSEA farmers union and a pig breeder from Brittany, tells Le Figaro. It is an imposition from distant, out-of-touch Eurocrats, laying waste to a sector they do not understand. It seems that Europe’s elites – whether in Brussels, Paris or Berlin – are too wedded to green ideology to see the damage they are doing.

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8) Terence Corcoran: Inside the litigious world of climate hockey sticks
Financial Post, 1 February 2024

From libel court to climate science to Milei economics

While Donald Trump’s embarrassing and costly defamation quagmire received all the headlines last week, a more significant libel trial was grinding on in another Washington courtroom. In a case initiated in 2012, climate scientist Michael E. Mann is alleging he was defamed by journalist Mark Steyn in a commentary in National Review in July of that year titled “Football and Hockey.” But rest assured that this trial is not a sports case.

Reports from the courthouse show Steyn, a Canadian and former National Post columnist, arriving in a wheelchair following heart attacks, to conduct his own defence in a case that has been dragged through a decade of legal wrangling. The trial is before a jury burdened with what looks like tens of thousands of pages of evidence filled with some of the most contentious libel and science issues.

The hockey part of Steyn’s 2012 commentary refers to Mann’s best-known achievement: a graph published in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that allegedly represents global temperatures dating back 1,000 years. The trend line in the graph shows relatively stable temperatures over hundreds of years but then shoots almost straight up in the 20th century. With its sharp upward surge angled toward 2000, the graph instantly became known as “The Hockey Stick Curve.”

The graph soon became a powerful and effective piece of supposed evidence for makers of climate policy and a near-religious icon that activists continue to revere. Coverage of the Mann-Steyn trial has been minimal in major media, except to raise the hockey stick even higher up the totem of policy worship. When the trial opened last month, The Guardian said Mann was an “esteemed” and “renowned” climate scientist who had been attacked by Steyn as part of a “network of climate sceptics” that continues to produce “online abuse of climate scientists” funded by fossil fuel industries.

Anyone interested in a different perspective on the trial can turn to non-media reports from the Heartland Institute and on Steyn’s website, where trial sessions are dramatized by actors and narrators.

Mann appeared as a witness on Monday under questioning from Steyn, who asked about the time Mann spread a story about climate scientist Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Mann, upset with her climate science, once claimed in emails that Curry as a student had an affair with a married man named Webster. “Judy Curry was a graduate student. Affairs, ugly divorce, et cetera, yada, yada. Webster and Curry left together … to the relief of everyone I know here who was around then.” Mann signed the email “mike.”

But Curry was not in fact a student at the time, and the story actually involved another woman. Mann on Tuesday admitted the affair stories were “rumours I was passing along” and that his “facts could be wrong.” Curry was expected to testify later this week, despite having been described by

Mann as “a serial misinformer when it comes to science.”

When it comes to science, Mann claims supreme authority and eagerly portrays his hockey stick as an icon that has helped drive climate policy. In his self-congratulatory 2021 book, The New Climate War, he said the hockey stick “was far more compelling to a layperson than the other abstract statistical work behind the key findings of the previous (IPCC) reports.”

But was the layperson’s instant guide to climate change solid science? It certainly looks authoritative. But from the beginning a number of scientists and experts severely criticized the data and methods behind its formulation. Among the leading critics were two Canadians: Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick and retired mining analyst Steve McIntyre

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see also: Francis Menton: Further Notes On Mann v. Steyn: The Plaintiff Rests

9) Matthew Lynn: Ignore the French: Net Zero is destroying British industry, not Brexit
The Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2024

Our fixation with decarbonisation will be economically ruinous. On the continent, it could be even worse

Sectors will go into terminal decline. Traditional industries will close. And blue-collar workers will lose forever the kind of well-paid jobs that could support a family. France’s youthful new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal took some time off yesterday from working out how to deal with the siege of Paris to blame Brexit for the decline of Britain’s heavy industry, and to warn that France could go the same way if it loosened its ties with Brussels.

This is quite a stretch. While industry might be struggling, it is our fanatical obsession Net Zero that is to blame, not Brexit.

For a 34-year-old who has only been in the job for a couple of weeks, Attal certainly doesn’t lack self-confidence. Like his mentor, President Macron, he has the answer to just about everything. In the French Parliament this week, he tore into Britain’s decision to leave the EU. “Last week, because of Brexit, the last blast furnaces in Great Britain closed. Steel is no longer produced in the UK. In France, on the contrary, thanks in particular to Europe, industry is coming back,” he said. Sure, it is an argument that may play well with French politicians. Whacking the English is always a good way to assert your authority in the Assemblée Nationale. The trouble is, Attal has got this one wrong on two counts.

First, there is very little evidence that our departure from the EU has made much difference to industry one way or another. After all, we are doing just as well, or poorly, as our rivals on the other side of the channel. France’s industrial output is estimated to have fallen by 0.5pc in the fourth quarter of last year, and expanded by just 0.1pc in the quarter before that. German industrial output is in freefall, and it is now more than 9pc below its pre-pandemic peak. In fact, although it may come as a surprise to Attal, the UK is now a larger manufacturing nation than France, with annual output of $272 billion compared with $262 billion for our closest neighbour, according to figures from Make UK. The last time I checked, both France and Germany were still inside the EU. It is hard to conclude from those figures that British manufacturing has suffered significantly, from our departure.

Next, and more importantly, it was Net Zero that killed off steel making in Port Talbot. The government decided to give Tata Steel £500 million to close down its traditional blast furnaces, and replace them with electric ones, which, while they generate less carbon dioxide, also employ far fewer workers. If there was more flexibility in the target, and some recognition that the UK was the first major developed country to halve its emissions, the plants would have been perfectly viable for many more years. At the same time, sky high energy prices, demented planning rules, and very soon carbon taxes as well, all demanded by the Net Zero fanatics, are making the operating environment tougher for industry than at any time over the last 50 years.

The irony is that Attal, along with the mandarins in Brussels that he champions, is even more committed to accelerating the drive to Net Zero than British politicians are. Indeed, the mini-Macron is facing angry protests from farmers across France this week over his government’s fanatical imposition of climate targets. At the same time, the EU itself is doubling down on commitment to Net Zero, with the Commission set to announce a new target next week to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 90pc by 2040, a mandate that would require a vast round of spending, and huge taxes on industry.

Attal’s comments may have been driven by concerns over the forthcoming European Parliament elections, which polls indicate will be bruising for Emmanuel Macron’s Renew alliance. Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally (RN) may need to break EU rules in order to fulfil its agenda – which may elicit support from the farmers currently camping out on Autoroute 6. Polls put the RN a full 10 points ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew alliance ahead of this summer’s European Parliament elections.

It is easy to blame Brexit for anything that goes wrong. But in reality, it is Net Zero that is killing off British industry, and very soon it will be killing off what remains of French industry as well.

10) You couldn’t make it up! German Greens push to water down EU party’s climate targets
EurActiv, 31 January 2024

The European Green Party is set for an internal battle over climate targets at a party congress this weekend (2-4 February), with the German Greens pushing to postpone the climate neutrality goals by five years and scrap parts of the gas and oil phase-out policies.

The European Green Party’s (EGP) draft manifesto, first reported on by Euractiv, calls on the EU to bring forward by ten years its target date for climate neutrality, from 2050 to 2040.

The German Greens have other plans, though, as they are now trying to push the manifesto’s target back to 2045, according to proposed amendments seen by Euractiv.

The manifesto will be discussed at the conference in Lyon and the final version adopted on Sunday (4 February).

The Germans are also pushing to remove calls to end the use of fossil gas by 2035 and of oil by 2040, keeping only the draft’s target of phasing out coal by 2030, as well as a call to prohibit financial services “for coal, oil and gas extraction, coal-fired energy projects, and the companies that develop them”.

The 2045 climate neutrality goal is already part of the Germany’s governing coalition agreement between the Greens, centre-left SPD and liberal FDP
The German Greens are thus looking to align the European Greens’ climate goal with the official line of the German coalition government.

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