We need to talk about Donald – the Nightmare continues

[Brian Peacock]

Coal is a dying industry.

Thanks to the economic gerrymandering that allows climate alarmists to trumpet that green energy is now "competitive."

Renewables already out-perform coal in the US in term of economic and employment growth as well as having a greater multiplier effect. That's the problem really: coal is in decline due to extraction limits and the increasing costs of recovering a dwindling resource, even with substantial subsidies - that's why they invested so heavily in Trump I guess.

[Scot Dutchy]

Australia knows everything about coal as well or are those massive open mines being shutdown.

[Alan B]

I suspect that coal & oil will still have be extracted because of their chemical resource. The end of 'digging them up' just to burn them is fast approaching.

[Animavore]

Majors, governors, cities and businesses all over America plan to go ahead with the Paris despite what President Dickhead says.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/c ... ebook.com/

[Brian Peacock]

I often wonder why the climate change deniers alwaya cite the negatives of doing something over the negatives of doing nothing.

[pErvinalia]

System justification.

[Forty Two]

Coal is a dying industry.

Thanks to the economic gerrymandering that allows climate alarmists to trumpet that green energy is now "competitive."

Renewables already out-perform coal in the US in term of economic and employment growth as well as having a greater multiplier effect. That's the problem really: coal is in decline due to extraction limits and the increasing costs of recovering a dwindling resource, even with substantial subsidies - that's why they invested so heavily in Trump I guess.

Do you have sources for this?

In any case, if "renewables" out-perform coal, then why would there be a need to subsidize or otherwise legally prefer "renewables?"

[pErvinalia]

Because the market is distorted with fossil fuels heavily subsidised and lobbying pressure from the industry.

[Hermit]

if "renewables" out-perform coal, then why would there be a need to subsidize or otherwise legally prefer "renewables?"

You mean the fossil fuel industry is not subsidised? And why bracket renewable energy in scare quotes?

[tattuchu]

[Animavore]

Fossils are subsidised to the tune of something like 5 trillion dollars a year globally compared to 88 billion for renewables. That's why there has been a push of late to divest from fossil and put the money into renewables instead.

[Forty Two]

Majors, governors, cities and businesses all over America plan to go ahead with the Paris despite what President Dickhead says.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/c ... ebook.com/

They plan to go ahead with a non-binding, non-enforceable agreement to do what each individual signatory decides to do in their own discretion? Fabulous.

And, all it takes to meet Paris Accord "goals" is to modify estimates of economic growth, since the accords refer to reductions per unit of GDP. LOL.

The deal is bad news for the American economy, projected to reduce GDP by $2.5 trillion over time, and to increase electricity costs for individual Americans by 15-20%. 400,000 lost jobs by 2035, half of which in manufacturing. All to reduce global warming negligibly.

US GHG emissions have gone down dramatically since 2006 - and, that's because of natural gas. Fracking. Without the Paris Accords, emissions are leveling off and dropping.

But the more seriously you take the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the angrier you should be about the plan for Paris. With so much political capital and so many legacies staked to achieving an “agreement” — any agreement — negotiators have opted to pursue one worth less than…well, certainly less than the cost of a two-week summit in a glamorous European capital.

Conventional wisdom holds that negotiators are hashing out a fair allocation of the deep emissions cuts all countries would need to make to limit warming. That image bears little resemblance to reality.

In fact, emissions reductions are barely on the table at all. Instead, the talks are rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take. The developing world, projected to account for four-fifths of all carbon-dioxide emissions this century, will earn applause for what amounts to a promise to stay on their pre-existing trajectory of emissions-intensive growth.

Developing countries actually blocked a requirement that the plans use a common format and metrics, so an INDC need not even mention emissions levels. Or a country can propose to reduce emissions off a self-defined “business-as-usual” trajectory, essentially deciding how much it wants to emit and then declaring it an “improvement” from the alternative. To prevent such submissions from being challenged, a group of developing countries led by China and India has rejected “any obligatory review mechanism for increasing individual efforts of developing countries.” And lest pressure nevertheless build on the intransigent, no developing country except Mexico submitted an INDC by the initial deadline of March 31 — and most either submitted no plan or submitted one only as the final September 30 cut-off approached.

After all this, the final submissions are not enforceable, and carry no consequences beyond “shame” for noncompliance — a fact bizarrely taken for granted by all involved.

MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change calculates the improvement by century’s end to be only 0.2 degrees Celsius. Comparing projected emissions to the baseline established by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000 shows no improvement at all.

So, China loves it, of course. Why wouldn't they? They have to do nothing except window dressing, and they can sit and watch the United States hobble its own economy.

China, for its part, offered to reach peak carbon-dioxide emissions “around 2030” while reducing emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65 percent by that time from its 2005 level. But the U.S. government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had already predicted China’s emissions would peak around 2030 even without the climate plan. And a Bloomberg analysis found that China’s 60-65 percent target is less ambitious than the level it would reach by continuing with business as usual. All this came before the country admitted it was burning 17 percent more coal than previously estimated—an entire Germany worth of extra emissions each year.

http://www.politico.eu/article/paris-cl ... ina-obama/

India, meanwhile, managed to lower the bar even further, submitting a report with no promise of emissions ever peaking or declining and only a 33-35 percent reduction in emissions per unit of GDP over the 2005-2030 period. Given India’s recent rate of improving energy efficiency, this actually implies a slower rate of improvement over the next 15 years. In its INDC, India nevertheless estimates it will need $2.5 trillion in support to implement its unserious plan.

We submit a plan that reduces emissions less than our current trend predicts, and get trillions of dollars for doing it. So, when we do nothing, we outperform!

And therein lies the sticking point on which negotiations actually center: “climate finance.” Climate finance is the term for wealth transferred from developed to developing nations based on a vague and shifting set of rationales including repayment of the “ecological debt” created by past emissions, “reparations” for natural disasters, and funding of renewable energy initiatives.

Follow the money -

The INDCs covering actual emissions reductions are subjective, discretionary, and thus essentially unnegotiable. Not so the cash. Developing countries are expecting more than $100 billion in annual funds from this agreement or they will walk away. (For scale, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire OECD budget for foreign development assistance.)

Somehow, the international process for addressing climate change has become one where addressing climate change is optional and apparently beside the point. Rich countries are bidding against themselves to purchase the developing world’s signature on an agreement so they can declare victory — even though the agreement itself will be the only progress achieved.

An echo chamber of activist groups and media outlets stands ready to rubber-stamp the final agreement as “historic,” validating the vast reservoirs of political capital spent on the exercise. Already, the Chinese and Indian non-plans have been lauded as proof that the developing world is acting and the United States stands as the true obstacle. India won the remarkably inapt New York Times headline: “India Announces Plan to Lower Rate of Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

One can imagine how the polling might look on: “Should the United States fight climate change by giving billions of dollars per year to countries that make no binding commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?” Certainly, President Obama has made no effort to even inform his constituents that such an arrangement is central to his climate agenda, let alone argue forcefully in favor of it.

The climate negotiators have no clothes. If making that observation and refusing to go along causes some embarrassment, those parading around naked have only themselves to blame.

http://www.politico.eu/article/paris-cl ... ina-obama/

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[Forty Two]

Fossils are subsidised to the tune of something like 5 trillion dollars a year globally compared to 88 billion for renewables. That's why there has been a push of late to divest from fossil and put the money into renewables instead.

Only when you include normal business tax deductions applicable to all businesses as "subsidies." It's impossible to discuss that issue without setting forth what the supposed subsidies are. Direct subsidies are not, for example, given at all by the US to fossil fuel companies.

For example - https://www.forbes.com/sites/drillingin ... 2f68a86e1c and http://www.aei.org/publication/the-trut ... r-big-oil/

The $5 trillion number is only arrived when they define a "subsidy" as including "including the social and environmental cost" -- but, when they define subsidies for wind, for example, they don't include social and environmental costs for wind, which would include massive numbers of bird deaths, and the use of massive amounts of land for wind farms, etc., together with the environmental impact of manufacturing, construction and maintenance of wind farm equipment, all of which would need to be factored in, if we're using environmental costs as a "subsidy." I mean, the IMF claims that the US and China pay out about 11% of their combined GDPs in "energy subsidies." The assertion is ludicrous on its face.

The "subsidy" argument is filled with "semantic infiltration" -

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to warn against “semantic infiltration” - employing less-than-accurate words in an effort to shape the debate. Moynihan’s caution is often ignored, but it’s still worth calling out the offenders. Among them is a favorite think tank of the Obama administration, the Center for American Progress (CAP), which regularly insists that taxpayers are “subsidizing big oil companies.”
That’s simply not true.
U.S. energy companies, specifically those in the oil business, are eligible for the same tax treatment as other U.S. industries. To understand this, it’s important to take a close look at the words being used.
CAP shrewdly - but inaccurately - conflates two completely different terms in public finance: subsidy and deduction. A subsidy is a payment made by the government, usually to promote the prospects of a specific technology or action - be it solar energy, ethanol or something else. Subsidies are often equated with handouts - a derisory term for sure.
A business deduction, on the other hand, is designed to ensure that a firm is taxed only on its net income. Deductions allow businesses to write off legitimate expenses from gross revenue to calculate net income. Deductions are widely regarded as proper in a system that taxes income, not revenue.
Properly defined, subsidies and deductions are as different as apples and oranges.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... sidy-myth/

[pErvinalia]

So what's Trump's plan to tackle global warming?


And the MIT report is not 0.2 degrees C. It's 3.5 degrees C. Trump, not surprisingly, botched that (or more likely lied).

[pErvinalia]

A good example of the subsidies is the current Adani coal mine proposal in Australia. Look it up. A couple of billion loan from the government (as no banks or equity firms will fund it), government built train line to the (government built) port, and royalty reductions as a further incentive.