GWPF | 12 Nov 2015
British people are less concerned than any other nationality about the risk they face from climate change, according to a survey ahead of negotiations on a global deal on emissions next month. Only 46 per cent of British people believe climate change will harm them personally in their lifetime, far below the global average of 72 per cent. The British are also less likely than most other major countries to agree with the statement that “global climate change is a very serious problem”. –Ben Webster, The Times, 12 November 2015
1) Cool Britannia: Britons Less Concerned About Climate Change Than Any Other Nation – The Times, 12 November 2015
2) Everything You Know About Ocean Acidification May Be Wrong – New Scientist, 9 November 2015
3) Asteroid Mining: No Limits To Infinite Growth – The Times, 12 November 2015
4) John Kerry: Paris Climate Deal Will Not Be Legally Binding – Financial Times, 12 November 2015
5) Bleeding To Death: Germany’s Largest Power Company E.ON Loses Whopping $7.8 Billion … Collapse Accelerates – No Tricks Zone, 11 November 2015
6) Is North America Heading for An Economic Civil War? – The Daily Beast, 8 November 2015
Acidic water may be a sign of healthy corals, says a new study, muddying the waters still further on our understanding of how coral reefs might react to climate change. Andreas Andersson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and his colleagues carefully monitored a coral reef in Bermuda for five years, and found that spikes in acidity were linked to increased reef growth. “At first we were really puzzled by this,” says Andersson. “It’s completely the opposite to what we would expect in an ocean-acidification scenario.” –Michael Slezak, New Scientist, 9 November 2015
The world’s first trillionaires will grow rich by mining asteroids. So say those who can see a future when humans call more than one planet home. Now, legislation just passed by Congress has brought that far-off suggestion a step closer to reality by granting US companies “finders, keepers” rights to natural resources obtained in space. That includes, perhaps, trillions of dollars-worth of platinum, gold, silver, iron, zinc, cobalt – and the main prize, water. By creating space-borne fuel depots, spacecraft would no longer be single-use vehicles but could be sent into action again and again on missions of discovery. Over the longer-term, resources such as platinum could be extracted and brought back to Earth. –Jacqui Goddard, The Times, 12 November 2015
John Kerry, US secretary of state, has warned that December’s Paris climate change talks will not deliver a “treaty” that legally requires countries to cut their carbon emissions, exposing international divisions over how to enforce a deal. The EU and other countries have long argued that the accord due to be reached next month should be an “international treaty” with legally binding measures to cut emissions. But in an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Kerry stressed there were “not going to be legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto”, a reference to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, a UN climate treaty that had targets for cutting emissions that countries ratifying it were legally obliged to meet. –Demetri Sevastopulo and Pilita Clark, Financial Times, 12 November 2015
E.on, Germany’s largest electric power producer, announced that it had lost over 7 billion euros in the 3rd quarter, reports Germany’s flagship news magazine Der Spiegel. Germany’s Energiewende, transition to renewable energies, which mandates power companies buy up solar, wind and other green energies at exorbitant prices, and even when they are not needed, continues to rapidly erode the German base-power production. Tens of thousands of once high-paying industrial jobs are now in serious jeopardy. It’s a real pity. Germany’s power companies used to be solid, high tech companies that delivered the most stable and efficient power in the world. Now they are literally being gutted alive before our very eyes. The country is setting itself up for some terrible times, and doing so fast. –Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 11 November 2015
When we speak about the ever-expanding chasm that defines modern American politics, we usually focus on cultural issues such as gay marriage, race, or religion. But as often has been the case throughout our history, the biggest source of division may be largely economic. Today we see a growing conflict between the economy that produces consumable, tangible goods and another economy, now ascendant, that deals largely in the intangible world of media, software, and entertainment. Like the old divide between the agrarian South and the industrial North before the Civil War, this threatens to become what President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, defined as an “irrepressible conflict.” –Joel Kotkin, The Daily Beast, 8 November 2015
1) Cool Britannia: Britons Less Concerned About Climate Change Than Any Other Nation
The Times, 12 November 2015
Ben Webster
British people are less concerned than any other nationality about the risk they face from climate change, according to a survey ahead of negotiations on a global deal on emissions next month.
Only 46 per cent of British people believe climate change will harm them personally in their lifetime, far below the global average of 72 per cent.
In every other nation among the 40 surveyed by the Pew Research Center, based in Washington, more than half the population believe they will suffer from rising temperatures. In Uganda, which has experienced severe flooding, 97 per cent believe they will be affected.
The French and Italians are almost twice as likely as the British to believe they will be harmed by climate change.
The British are also less likely than most other major countries to agree with the statement that “global climate change is a very serious problem”.
2) Everything You Know About Ocean Acidification May Be Wrong
New Scientist, 9 November 2015
Michael Slezak
Acidic water may be a sign of healthy corals, says a new study, muddying the waters still further on our understanding of how coral reefs might react to climate change.
Andreas Andersson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and his colleagues carefully monitored a coral reef in Bermuda for five years, and found that spikes in acidity were linked to increased reef growth.
“At first we were really puzzled by this,” says Andersson. “It’s completely the opposite to what we would expect in an ocean-acidification scenario.”
The researchers observed the chemistry of the water on the reef between 2007 and 2012. During that time, there were two sharp spikes in acidity – once in 2010 and again in 2011.
The team found that coral growth itself made the water more acidic as the corals sucked alkaline carbonate out of the water to build their skeletons. The corals also ate more food during these high-activity periods and pumped more CO2 into the water, increasing acidity further.
So the researchers tried to figure out what was driving the changes in coral growth and water acidity. Luckily, there is a station 80 kilometres further offshore from this reef that also measures ocean chemistry. They found that the two spikes in coral growth and acidity coincided with peaks in blooms of phytoplankton – single-celled plants that corals feed on.
All the pieces then seemed to fit together: phytoplankton blooms seemed to be washing in and feeding the corals, resulting in a higher growth rate and greater acidity levels in the water around the reef.
Coral conundrum
The results complicate the question of how coral reefs will respond to climate change, which is raising the acidity of the oceans. “Do corals care about ocean pH if they have plenty of food and light? At this point, we don’t fully know the answer to that question,” says Andersson.
3) Asteroid Mining: No Limits To Infinite Growth
The Times, 12 November 2015
Jacqui Goddard
The world’s first trillionaires will grow rich by mining asteroids. So say those who can see a future when humans call more than one planet home.
Now, legislation just passed by Congress has brought that far-off suggestion a step closer to reality by granting US companies “finders, keepers” rights to natural resources obtained in space. That includes, perhaps, trillions of dollars-worth of platinum, gold, silver, iron, zinc, cobalt – and the main prize, water.
“Many years from now, we will view this pivotal moment in time as a major step toward humanity becoming a multi-planetary species,” said Eric Anderson, co-founder of Planetary Resources, a company at the forefront of asteroid mining.
“This legislation establishes the same supportive framework that created the great economies of history, and it will foster the sustained development of space,” he added.
The inner reaches of the Solar System harbour more than 150 million asteroids of 100 metres diameter or larger. Chunks of rock left over from the formation of planets billions of years ago, they contain precious metals and valuable minerals in quantities greater than Earth could ever yield.
One of the prime target of those currently developing the technology to tap into asteroids is water, which in the space exploration industry is worth more than its weight in gold. Essential not only for sustaining astronauts in space, it can also be used to create rocket fuel, and costs $50 million per tonne to haul into orbit from Earth. Mining it in space opens up major, cheaper opportunities for both crewed and unmanned space travel and for expanding human activities in space – which Nasa ultimately aims to include a manned base on Mars.
By creating space-borne fuel depots, spacecraft would no longer be single-use vehicles but could be sent into action again and again on missions of discovery.
Minerals from asteroids could also serve as construction materials in space, sparing companies or government agencies some of the cost and logistical challenges of sending them up from Earth.
Over the longer-term, resources such as platinum could be extracted and brought back to Earth.
4) John Kerry: Paris Climate Deal Will Not Be Legally Binding
Financial Times, 12 November 2015
Demetri Sevastopulo and Pilita Clark
John Kerry, US secretary of state, has warned that December’s Paris climate change talks will not deliver a “treaty” that legally requires countries to cut their carbon emissions, exposing international divisions over how to enforce a deal.
The EU and other countries have long argued that the accord due to be reached next month should be an “international treaty” with legally binding measures to cut emissions. But in an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Kerry insisted the agreement was “definitively not going to be a treaty”.
He said it would contain measures that would drive a “significant amount of investment” towards a low-carbon global economy. But he stressed there were “not going to be legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto”, a reference to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, a UN climate treaty that had targets for cutting emissions that countries ratifying it were legally obliged to meet.
Delegates from 195 countries are due to finalise a new global climate accord in Paris that will replace the Kyoto treaty, which failed to stop emissions rising. The US signed but failed to ratify that treaty, largely because it did not cover China, now the world’s largest carbon polluter.
The Paris deal is supposed to cover all countries, but Mr Kerry’s comments underline the differences between the US and other nations over how to ensure it is robust enough to shift billions of dollars of investment away from fossil fuels and towards greener energy sources.
A European Commission spokeswoman on Wednesday said the commission and many nations “would like the Paris agreement to be in the form of a protocol or a treaty” which would represent “the strongest expression of political will and also for the future it provides predictability and durability”.
5) Bleeding To Death: Germany’s Largest Power Company E.ON Loses Whopping $7.8 Billion … Collapse Accelerates
No Tricks Zone, 11 November 2015
P Gosselin
E.on, Germany’s largest electric power producer, announced that it had lost over 7 billion euros in the 3rd quarter, reports Germany’s flagship news magazine Spiegel here.
The loss stems from the writing down of the value of coal and gas power generation assets by billions of euros due to the steep drop in wholesale electricity prices. The write-offs were necessary in light of the dismal future the fossil industry faces. Plainly said: Germany’s Energiewende, transition to renewable energies, which mandates power companies buy up solar, wind and other green energies at exorbitant prices, and even when they are not needed, continues to rapidly erode the German base-power production.
Tens of thousands of once high-paying industrial jobs are now in serious jeopardy.
“Squeezed out” by massively subsidized green energy
With mandated green energies, the European power market is seeing a huge oversupply of power on the market that has wholesale prices far too low to cover generation costs.
“The company’s gas and coal power plants are hardly earning money due to the plummeted power exchange prices. Through the [massively subsidized] green energies, the conventional power plants are being squeezed out of the market throughout the branch. The price at the Leipzig EEX power exchange has halved over the past 4 years.”
Aren’t government subsidies and market meddling wonderful?
The hemorrhaging is far from over. Spiegel also reports that “E.on had a record 3.2 billion Euro loss in 2014“. Germany’s No. 2 power producer, RWE, is also reeling. Bloomberg here writes:
“Germany’s shift to renewable energy is hurting utilities from EON to RWE AG as margins get squeezed at traditional coal and gas-fired plants because green power gets priority access to the grid. EON, the third-worst performer in Germany’s DAX stock index this year, is responding by spinning off its fossil-fuel plants into a separate company. RWE in 2013 had its first annual loss since 1949.”
Poor, working class getting hit hard
The tragedy of this mandated oversupply is that low wholesale prices, which at times are even negative, are not getting passed along to the consumers. Rather next year German consumers will see new record-high electricity prices. Already poor households are reeling and electricity is becoming a luxury for the affluent only.
The media reports that the Düsseldorf-based power producer will be spinning off its “entire power plant business” in the form of a new company called Uniper at the end of the year. It is reported that E.on itself will focus on “renewable energies and sales”.
It’s a real pity. Germany’s power companies used to be solid, high tech companies that delivered the most stable and efficient power in the world. Now they are literally being gutted alive before our very eyes. The country is setting itself up for some terrible times, and doing so fast.
6) Is North America Heading for An Economic Civil War?
The Daily Beast, 8 November 2015
Joel Kotkin
Forget that red state-blue state stuff. The real chasm dividing the US is economic, with one economy for industry and one for tech, and the friction between them is getting fierce.
Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
Today we see a growing conflict between the economy that produces consumable, tangible goods and another economy, now ascendant, that deals largely in the intangible world of media, software, and entertainment. Like the old divide between the agrarian South and the industrial North before the Civil War, this threatens to become what President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, defined as an “irrepressible conflict.”
Other major economic divides—between capital and labor, Wall Street versus Main Street—defined politics for much of the 20th century. But today’s tangible-intangible divide is particularly tragic because it undermines America’s peculiar advantage in being a powerhouse in both the material and non-material worlds. No other large country can say that, certainly not China, Japan, or Germany, industrial powerhouses short on resources, while our closest cousins, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, remain, for the most part, dependent on commodity trade.
The China syndrome and the shape of the next slowdown
Over the past decade, the United States has enjoyed two parallel booms that combined to propel the economy out of recession. One was centered in places like Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, and across much of the Great Plains. These areas were all located in the first states to emerge from the recession, and benefited massively from a gusher in energy jobs due largely to fracking.
At the same time, another part of the economy, centered in Silicon Valley as well as Seattle, Austin, and Raleigh/Durham, has also been booming. Though far more restricted than their counterparts in the “tangible” economy in terms of both geography and jobs, the tech/digital economy did not lag when it came to minting fortunes. By 2014, the media-tech sector accounted for six of the nation’s wealthiest people. Perhaps more important, 12 of the nation’s 17 billionaires under 40 also hail from the tech sector.
Until China’s economy hit a wall this fall, these two sectors were humming along, maybe not enough to restore the economy to its ’90s trim robustly enough to improve conditions in many parts of the country. But as China begins to cut back on commodity purchases, many key raw material prices—copper and iron to oil and gas as well as food stuffs—have fallen precipitously, devastating many developing economies in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Plunging prices are also beginning to hurt many local economies in the U.S., particularly in the “oil patch” that spreads from west Texas to North Dakota. This is one reason why overall economic growth has fallen, and is unlikely to revive strongly in the months ahead. Overall, according to the most recent numbers, job growth remains slow and long-term unemployment stubbornly high while labor participation is stuck at historically low levels. Much of this loss is felt by the kind of middle and working class people who tend to work in tangible industries.
But it’s not just the much maligned energy economy that is in danger. The recovery of manufacturing was one of the most heartening “feel good” stories of the recession. Every Great Lakes state except Illinois now enjoys an unemployment rate below the national average, and several, led by the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa, boast unemployment that is among the lowest in the nation. Now a combination of a too-strong dollar, declining demand for heavy equipment, and falling food prices threaten economies throughout the Great Lakes and the Great Plains.
Waging war on the tangible economy
President Obama’s emphasis on battling climate change—aimed largely at the energy and manufacturing sectors—in his last year in office will only exacerbate these conflicts. For one thing, the administration’s directive to all but ban coal could prove problematic for many Midwest states, including several—Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, and Indiana—that rely the most on coal for electricity.
Not surprisingly, much of the opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decrees come from heartland states such as Oklahoma, Indiana, and Michigan. The President’s belated rejection of the Keystone Pipeline is also intensely unpopular, including among traditionally Democratic-leaning construction unions.
These policies have also succeeded to pushing the energy industry, in particular, to the right. In 1990 energy firms contributed almost as much to Democrats as to Republicans; last year they gave more than three times as much to the GOP. This underlying economic conflict is redefining our politics less along lines of ideology and more in terms of interests.
In contrast, the tech oligarchs and their media allies largely embrace the campaign against fossil fuels. Environmental icon Bill McKibben, for example, has won strong backing in Silicon Valleyfor his drive to marginalize oil much like the tobacco industry was ostracized earlier. Meanwhile the onetime pragmatic interest in natural gas as a cleaner replacement for coal is fading, as the green lobby demands not just the reduction of fossil fuel but its rapid extermination.
Embracing the green agenda costs Silicon Valley little. High electricity prices may take away blue collar jobs, but they don’t bother the affluent, well-educated, Telsa-driving denizens of the Bay Area, who also pay less for power. But those rates are devastating to the less glamorous people who live in California interior. As one recent study found, the average summer electrical bill in rich, liberal andtemperate Marin County was $250 a month, while in impoverished , hotter Madera, the average bill was twice as high.
Many Silicon Valley and Wall Street supporters also see business opportunities in the assault on fossil fuels. Cash-rich firms like Google and Apple, along with many high-tech financiers and venture capitalist, have invested in subsidized green energy firms. Some of these tech oligarchs, like Elon Musk, exist largely as creatures of subsidies. Neither SolarCity nor Tesla would be so attractive—might not even exist—without generous handouts.
