GWPF | 3 Dec 2015
US Wants Developing Nations To Share Climate Finance Costs
The Paris climate talks could fail because developed nations are trying to dodge their financial responsibilities to developing countries, China and India have claimed. Industrialised countries are currently obliged to provide billions of pounds of funding to developing countries to help them go green and adapt to the impacts of global warming. But a draft of the Paris agreement includes new wording, backed by the US and EU, suggesting funding should be provided not only by countries formally classed as “developed” but also by others “in a position to do so”. In a strongly-worded joint statement on Wednesday, China and the “Group of 77″ (G77) developing nations, which includes India, said they were “deeply concerned with the attempts to introduce economic conditions in the finance section currently under negotiation”. —Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2016
From optimism the first day, the Paris climate talks descended into scepticism on Wednesday with negotiators shoehorning new agenda for a likely international agreement to cope with global warming. Laurent Fabius, French foreign minister and president of the conference, expressed concern over the “slow pace” of negotiations in the different auxiliary groups with each one discussing a contentious issue for the Paris deal. Indian representatives said differences between various teams have widened since Monday when 154 heads of state struck a conciliatory note.—Chetan Chauhan, Hindustan Times, 3 December 2015
1) Funding Row ‘Threatens Paris Climate Deal’, India And China Warn – The Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2016
2) Paris COP, Day 3: After The Hype And The Hope, Scepticism And Doubt – Hindustan Times, 3 December 2015
3) Matt Ridley: The Green Delusion – The Spectator, 5 December 2015
4) Benny Peiser: An Age Of Climate Realism Is Upon Us – The Spectator, 5 December 2015
5) Patricia Adams: China’s Climate Power Game – Financial Post, 3 December 2015
6) Peter Foster: The Man Who Shaped The Climate Agenda In Paris, Maurice Strong, Leaves A Complicated Legacy – National Post, 29 November 2015
7) Paris COP21: Day 3 In The Big Brother House – Global Warming Policy Forum, 3 December 2015
The Paris climate conference has attracted about 40,000 delegates and camp followers, from politicians and civil servants to journalists and campaigners. I don’t have the numbers, but I would be willing to bet that very few of them paid their own air fares or hotel bills. A goodly proportion will have sent the bill to taxpayers in various countries, either directly or via the grants that governments give to green pressure groups. Perhaps the politicians should stop listening to the vested interest of the Green Blob and begin asking what long-suffering taxpayers and real voters think about hitting poor people today in order to protect the incomes of rich people in 2100? —Matt Ridley, The Spectator, 5 December 2015
For Europe and the UK, whose heavy industries are struggling to remain competitive under the weight of unilateral climate taxes and CO2 obligations, a voluntary Paris deal would deliver a real chance to change course. The EU’s own Paris offer, pledging to cut CO2 by 40 per cent below the 1990 level by 2030, is conditional on the UN agreement being legally binding for all major emitters. But if Europe’s key demand for a level playing field is not met, poor EU member states from Eastern and Central Europe will almost certainly refuse to make the EU’s own pledges legally binding. After Paris, the battle for a return to realistic climate policy will begin in earnest. —Benny Peiser, The Spectator, 5 December 2015
For President Obama to make good on his promise to stop the oceans from rising, he needs China’s Communist Party to agree to curb its CO2 emissions at the UN’s Climate Conference in Paris. This it will never do. China’s Communist Party knows that to stay in power – its highest priority – it must maintain the economic growth rates that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition at bay. Curbing fossil fuel use, China’s leaders understand, would dampen its already faltering growth and provide an existential threat to their rule. While they may talk a good game at the UN’s Paris talks, they will make no binding commitments to reduce C02. —Patricia Adams, Financial Post, 3 December 2015
Maurice Strong has died at the age of 86. Multi-faceted does not begin to describe his life. More than any other individual, he was responsible for promoting the climate agenda with which negotiators are struggling this week at the UN meeting in Paris. Before the last great failed attempt to come up with a global climate agreement, at Copenhagen in 2009, which took place at a time of economic turmoil, Strong said: “The climate change issue and the economic issue come from the same roots. And that is the gross inequity and the inadequacy of our economic model. We now know that we have to change that model. We cannot do all of this in one stroke. But we have to design a process that would produce agreement at a much more radical level.” “We must,” he had suggested earlier, “devise a new approach to co-operative management of the entire system of issues… We are all gods now.” —Peter Foster, National Post, 29 November 2015
1) Funding Row ‘Threatens Paris Climate Deal’, India And China Warn
The Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2016
Emily Gosden
Developing nations including India and China issue strongly-worded statement attacking rich nations over funding
The Paris climate talks could fail because developed nations are trying to dodge their financial responsibilities to developing countries, China and India have claimed.
Industrialised countries are currently obliged to provide billions of pounds of funding to developing countries to help them go green and adapt to the impacts of global warming.
But a draft of the Paris agreement includes new wording, backed by the US and EU, suggesting funding should be provided not only by countries formally classed as “developed” but also by others “in a position to do so”.
In a strongly-worded joint statement on Wednesday, China and the “Group of 77″ (G77) developing nations, which includes India, said they were “deeply concerned with the attempts to introduce economic conditions in the finance section currently under negotiation”.
“Any attempt to replace the core obligation of developed countries to provide financial support to developing countries with a number of arbitrarily identified economic conditions is a violation of the rules-based multilateral process and threatens an outcome here in Paris,” it said.
The intervention stands in stark contrast to the largely positive statements issued by world leaders on Monday pledging support for a deal, and comes amid growing concerns that slow progress of the negotiations may also jeopardise an agreement.
In the statement, the G77 and China said that developed nations were required to provide funding not as “aid” but rather an as an obligation stemming from their historical emissions.
They accused rich nations of trying to present a new “simplistic narrative” that, due to the “dramatic economic development gains” of some developing nations, it was “time to expand the pool of so-called ‘donors’ of climate ‘aid’ and to narrow the list of those eligible to receive this ‘support’ to only the ‘poorest of the poor’”.
“This narrative serves narrow national interests of developed countries and says little about reality,” they said.
Developed nations are currently required to “mobilise” $100 billion a year of climate finance to help developing nations by 2020.
The statement from the Group of 77 and China said there must be “a substantial scaling up of finance from the 2020 base level of $100 billion per year” and that developed countries bear “the main responsibility” for this.
Experts suggested the statement on finance may be a negotiating tactic by the G77 and China designed to extract concessions in other areas.
2) Paris COP, Day 3: After The Hype And The Hope, Scepticism And Doubt
Hindustan Times, 3 December 2015
Chetan Chauhan
From optimism the first day, the Paris climate talks descended into scepticism on Wednesday with negotiators shoehorning new agenda for a likely international agreement to cope with global warming.
Laurent Fabius, French foreign minister and president of the conference, expressed concern over the “slow pace” of negotiations in the different auxiliary groups with each one discussing a contentious issue for the Paris deal.
Indian representatives said differences between various teams have widened since Monday when 154 heads of state struck a conciliatory note.
“I will urge the negotiators to speed up the resolution of differences to have a text for political discussion starting next week,” the minister told reporters.
Fabius has asked interlocutors to submit a “consensus” draft by Saturday for final discussions by ministers next week.
Among contentious issues are the review mechanism for climate action plan 2030 of every country, higher ambition from the developed world and a clear road map for climate finance after 2020. While rich countries have committed $100 billion by 2020, they have not promised anything beyond that period.
“We are still at an early stage where there are difficulties and possibility of resolution. It is too early in the day to say what would be there in the final agreement,” said Ajay Mathur, chief spokesperson of India’s climate negotiating team. “We are here to negotiate and we are talking to narrow down differences”.
3) Matt Ridley: The Green Delusion
The Spectator, 5 December 2015
In trying to protect ‘our grandchildren’ from climate change, politicians are hurting the poor. They shouldn’t
The next generation is watching, Barack Obama told the Paris climate conference this week: ‘Our grandchildren, when they look back and see what we did in Paris, they can take pride in what we did.’ And that, surely, is the trouble with the entire climate-change agenda: putting the interests of rich people’s grandchildren ahead of those of poor people today.
Unfair? Not really, when you look at the policies enacted in the name of mitigating climate change. We’ve diverted 40 per cent of America’s maize crop to feeding cars instead of people, thus driving up the price of food worldwide, a move which according to one study killed about 192,000 poor people in 2010 alone, and continues to affect nutrition worldwide. We’ve restricted aid funding for fossil-fuelled power stations in developing countries, leaving many people who would otherwise have had access to electricity mired in darkness and cooking over wood-fires — the biggest environmental cause of ill health, responsible for more than three million deaths every year.
Closer to home, by pushing up energy prices with climate policies, we’ve contributed to the loss of jobs of steelworkers in Redcar and Scunthorpe, and of aluminium workers in Northumberland (where I live and where coal from under my land has supplied the now-closed Lynemouth smelter — whose power station announced this week that it will reopen as a ‘biomass’ plant, that is to say burning wood from American forests, producing more carbon dioxide per unit of energy and at twice the price of coal). We’ve also worsened fuel poverty among the poor and elderly and we’ve damaged air quality in cities. These human costs are not imaginary or theoretical: they are real.
But ends can be used to justify means, and omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs. We justify the painful impact of policy by saying over and over that it helps to avert a far greater threat that faces ‘our grandchildren’. So exactly how great is that threat?
Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, one of the world’s most respected climate economists, has had a stab at answering this question in a new paper accepted for publication in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, which takes all 22 published studies of all the impacts of climate change, good and bad, economic and environmental, and generates an average effect on welfare. This is what he has to say:
Global warming of 2.5˚C would make the average person feel as if she had lost 1.3 per cent of her income… That is, a century of climate change is about as good/bad for welfare as a year of economic growth. Statements that climate change is the biggest problem of humankind are unfounded: We can readily think of bigger problems.
Up till 2.2˚C, he says, our grandchildren will actually still be better off as a result of global warming. When I first reported in The Spectator in 2013 that the balance of evidence suggests that mild global warming will do more good than harm and that this would continue till the later decades of this century, I was subjected to torrents of abuse in the Guardian and other house organs of wealthy greens. Yet it has now come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.
Yes, but what if climate change proves worse than we expect and the century sees more than 2.5˚C of warming? (Actually, given what we now know about climate sensitivity, that’s unlikely: the probability density function for such rapid warming is very slim and depends on unrealistically large net-positive feedbacks.) Professor Tol says the following: ‘The impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5˚C warming.’ And remember that ‘our grandchildren’ will on average be much richer than we are today. If they are not, then there’s not much of a problem because they won’t be generating emissions at a worrying rate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in its various scenarios that the people of 2100 will be between three and 20 times as well off in income terms as the people of today — and that’s despite climate change. In the ‘middle of the road’ scenario prepared by the OECD for the IPCC, which sees generally disappointing global economic progress, the average Indonesian, Brazilian or Chinese will earn at least twice as much as today’s American does. That’s how rich ‘our grandchildren’ will be, never mind Barack’s. In causing pain today for benefit tomorrow, we are transferring money from the poor to the rich.
So let’s just pause to reflect what is going on here. President Obama, President Putin, Prince Charles, Ban Ki-Moon and the Pope are urging us to worry about what will probably be a 1.3 per cent fall in the income (or about 3.5 per cent if we get 3.5˚C of warming) of a person who is at least three times as well off as we are today. That is to say, they would be at least 196.5 per cent richer, instead of 200 per cent. And yet world leaders are prepared to adopt and defend policies that hurt poor people today in order to try to avert this very slight pay cut for the very wealthy of tomorrow. In what universe does this entitle them to occupy the moral high ground?
Oh and by the way, perhaps we should ask the poor people of the world themselves what they think about this? On Monday Mr Obama quoted an Indonesian girl he met recently who was worried about climate change. I wonder how he managed to find her. The United Nations is carrying out a huge online survey of people’s priorities. Called ‘My World’, it allows people to rank 16 categories of things they care about. So far more than 8.5 million people have voted, mostly from poorer countries, and the number is growing all the time. Education, health, jobs and good governance come top. Action on climate change comes last — and not by a narrow margin either: it lags well behind the second-least popular priority (phone and internet access). Even among people aged 15 or younger, it comes last.
Climate change is an obsession of the rich which is not shared by the global poor, who care more about everything, even getting online. They can see all too well that a slight diminution of income in two generations’ time is not as important as decent health, education and a better living standard today. So let’s cut the humbug about speaking on behalf of poor posterity, please. Though they might not mean to, the green great and good are on the side of the rich.
Not that the inhabitants of rich countries are any longer much enamoured of such policies. As Gallup reports: ‘Warming has generally ranked last among Americans’ environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.’ In another poll last week just 13 per cent of Canadians chose climate change as one of their top three concerns.
4) Benny Peiser: An Age Of Climate Realism Is Upon Us
The Spectator, 5 December 2015
After Paris, the battle for a return to realistic climate policy will begin in earnest.
The Paris meeting is not even attempting to achieve what the 2009 Copenhagen summit failed to do: reach a legally binding treaty on cutting CO2 emissions. Instead, the aim is to replace the legally binding targets of the Kyoto Protocol (which runs out in 2020) with voluntary pledges tailored to the national considerations of individual countries.
In short, the Paris climate deal will mean abandoning the notion of making decarbonisation legally binding — at least for the time being. Even so, governments from around the world are keen to sign an agreement that will allow political leaders to declare a victory, and to move on. At the same time, officials readily accept that painful decisions will be kicked into the long grass. Thus, the Paris accord is likely to be a ‘wait and see’ arrangement which, for the next decade at least, suspends any attempt of reaching a binding decarbonisation treaty. Such an outcome will almost certainly trigger a fundamental reassessment of Europe’s go-it-alone-no-matter-what-the-costs decarbonisation policies.
Why has it proven impossible for such summits to make the kind of progress that was, until recently, billed as a matter of saving the world? Firstly, policies that commit western governments to unilateral decarbonisation have turned out to be more costly and politically toxic than conventional wisdom proclaimed. Rather than running out of fossil fuels — and thereby making renewable energy more competitive — the US shale revolution and the prospect of its global proliferation has triggered a glut of cheap oil and gas. Fuel prices have fallen and look set to remain low for the foreseeable future. As a result, the bridge to a world powered by renewable energy has become longer rather than shorter.
Also, poor countries remain categorically opposed to signing any agreement that would impede economic growth by limiting the use of cheap fossil fuels. Rather than decarbonising, most Asian and African countries are banking on cheap coal. In Asia, more than 500 coal-fired power plants have been built in the first nine months of this year alone, while an estimated 1,000 new coal plants are set to power up in coming years.
To counterbalance western pressure, developing countries are demanding sizable funding for adaptation and the transition to renewable energy. Once, President Obama promised developing nations an annual climate fund of $100 billion, by 2020, in return for their signatures on a global climate deal. That was six years ago; most developing nations have since realised that his pledge will never materialise. Neither the US Senate nor debt-addled European governments are willing to commit to such an astronomical annual wealth transfer.
Global surface temperatures have failed to adhere to the predictions of climate modellers. Rather than rapid warming, as the IPCC has predicted, the temperature rise has been barely discernible, standing nearly still for most of the last 20 years. The global warming slowdown has enabled a number of governments to downgrade the climate agenda in favour of energy security (or affordable energy) and to take a more gradual approach. Most world leaders are aware of the controversy surrounding the warming hiatus which has given them valuable time to keep prevaricating.
The warming pause has significantly weakened public concern — giving ministers the opportunity to delay, water down or even get rid of what David Cameron famously called ‘green crap’. Cameron’s Conservative government has certainly set a new tone in recent months. It has announced that energy security and affordability of energy will henceforth be prioritised over the climate agenda.
For Europe and the UK, whose heavy industries are struggling to remain competitive under the weight of unilateral climate taxes and CO2 obligations, a voluntary Paris deal would deliver a real chance to change course. The EU’s own Paris offer, pledging to cut CO2 by 40 per cent below the 1990 level by 2030, is conditional on the UN agreement being legally binding for all major emitters. But if Europe’s key demand for a level playing field is not met, poor EU member states from Eastern and Central Europe will almost certainly refuse to make the EU’s own pledges legally binding. After Paris, the battle for a return to realistic climate policy will begin in earnest.
Benny Peiser is the director of the Global Warming Policy Forum
5) Patricia Adams: China’s Climate Power Game
Financial Post, 3 December 2015
China’s Communist party won’t curb the country’s CO2 emissions – doing so could lead to their overthrow
For President Obama to make good on his promise to stop the oceans from rising, he needs China’s Communist Party to agree to curb its CO2 emissions at the UN’s Climate Conference in Paris. This it will never do. China’s Communist Party knows that to stay in power – its highest priority – it must maintain the economic growth rates that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition at bay. Curbing fossil fuel use, China’s leaders understand, would dampen its already faltering growth and provide an existential threat to their rule. While they may talk a good game at the UN’s Paris talks, they will make no binding commitments to reduce C02.
Talking a good game on climate change will do more than deflect criticism from the West. It will also bring in billions in climate aid from the U.S. and other Western countries, and improve China’s international standing. Talking a good game will also serve Obama’s interests. He and Chinese President Xi signed a much-ballyhooed agreement last November, promising to produce a global agreement in Paris. In this, Obama’s last best opportunity to claim achievements on climate change, he will do whatever is necessary to ensure the conference culminates with grand statements and an agreement among the world’s leaders. What will be necessary is cash.
The cash is already forthcoming: by the U.S., which promised $3 billion; by Canada, which promised $2 billion; by Japan, which promised $1.5 billion; by the U.K., which promised $1.2 billion; and by France and Germany, which each promised just over $1 billion. These sums are in response to China’s demand of $100 billion a year by 2020 for itself and the rest of the developing world, after which the West is expected to up the amount to 1 per cent of its GDP. America’s contribution alone would then be some $230 billion annually and rising, Canada’s some C$25 billion annually and rising, or C$3,000 for a family of four.
Because China holds all the cards at Paris – as the world’s leading CO2 emitter, it knows the success of the talks depends entirely on the bones it will deign to throw to the West – it will also squeeze the West diplomatically. China sees its role at the talks – what it says it really wants to do and intends to do well – is to organize a Third World lobby to hold the West accountable based on “the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” The differentiated responsibilities require the developed countries to commit to legally binding CO2 reductions while the developing countries, subject to no legally binding targets, would merely commit to take “enhanced mitigation actions” funded by developed countries. […]
It is sometimes said that, unlike the tensions elsewhere between the two countries, the U.S. and China share goals over climate change. In fact, they mostly share a desire for pretence. At the Paris summit, Xi will pretend he’s serious about cutting back CO2 emissions and Obama will pretend that Xi’s pretence will help save the planet.
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6) Paris COP21: Day 3 In The Big Brother House
Global Warming Policy Forum, 3 December 2015
On Wednesday, 2 December, COP 21 and CMP 11 convened in plenary to continue opening agenda items. Spin-off groups and ‘informal informals’ continued to meet.
- Co-Chair of the Global Climate Fund, Henrik Harboe, highlighted key milestones achieved so far, these included signed contribution agreements representing 58% of the initial US$10 billion in pledges to the fund.
- The United Nations Adaptation Fund, which finances projects and programmes in developing countries in order to help them adapt to climate change, warned that the sustainability of the fund was “in danger”.
- There was a long discussion and significant disagreement over a request for the Secretariat of the conference to “provide information on the fairness and ambition of the INDCs”. These are the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions submitted by countries before the conference. Malaysia, representing the Like-minded Developing Countries (LDCs) such as India, Russia and Saudi Arabia, called for deleting the text. Others made alternative proposals, such as Tuvalu, suggesting “information on how parties have reported on fairness and ambition”. Interested parties agreed to work on a new proposal. The disagreement exposes the split between developed and island nations, and developing nations, which has long frustrated the desires of climate change alarmists.
- In a similar vein, Saint Lucia, who proposed a consideration of consistency with 1.5°C scenarios to be included in the ‘synthesis report’, was opposed by the Arab Group, who wanted the reference to ‘degrees’ to be deleted altogether.
- In what might be interpreted as a sign that the conference is heading a similar way as the Copenhagen conference, some anonymous ADP contact group delegates were reported to be dismayed at the slow pace and about what was characterized as a tense atmosphere in the ADP contact group, all with eyes toward the looming ADP deadline. One party was stated as saying that “now is the time to reflect that we might not deliver what we want to deliver by next week.”
- As it became clear that conference negotiations were falling behind schedule, Laurent Fabius, President of COP21 stressed urgency, saying: “COP21 are about negotiations, but also about solutions…we must speed up!”
- However Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, was more positive about how proceedings had been going, talking about a “good start”, and dismissing GOP resolutions to cut Obama’s EPA Climate Rules, saying “I don’t think it actually has much of an effect here.”
7) Peter Foster: The Man Who Shaped The Climate Agenda In Paris, Maurice Strong, Leaves A Complicated Legacy
National Post, 29 November 2015
Maurice Strong has died at the age of 86. Multi-faceted does not begin to describe his life. More than any other individual, he was responsible for promoting the climate agenda with which negotiators are struggling this week at the UN meeting in Paris.
Maurice Strong, then special advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in 2003. The head of the U.N.’s environmental agency says Strong, whose work helped lead to the landmark climate summit that begins in Paris on Monday, Nov. 30, 2015, has died. He was 86. Photo: Tom Hanson/ The Canadian Press
Strong also played a major role in Canadian affairs. When he celebrated his 85th birthday in Toronto last year, he was surrounded by Canada’s left liberal elite — from former prime minister Paul Martin to former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul.
Martin had been an employee and protégé of Strong. Ralston Saul had been chief aide to Strong when Strong was the first chairman, president and CEO of state oil company Petro-Canada, just one of many executive positions in a remarkable career.
Clarkson claimed that Strong had “invented the environment.” While that may have been somewhat exaggerated, he did play a critical role in promoting political responses to environmental concerns. As a lifelong socialist, he saw the potential of the environmental movement to fight capitalism and introduce a system of “global governance” that would co-ordinate all human activity.
Before the last great failed attempt to come up with a global climate agreement, at Copenhagen in 2009, which took place at a time of economic turmoil, Strong said: “The climate change issue and the economic issue come from the same roots. And that is the gross inequity and the inadequacy of our economic model. We now know that we have to change that model. We cannot do all of this in one stroke. But we have to design a process that would produce agreement at a much more radical level.”
“We must,” he had suggested earlier, “devise a new approach to co-operative management of the entire system of issues… We are all gods now.”
Strong was reputed to be a Buddhist, but when Pope Francis issued his climate encyclical earlier this year, he praised Strong’s Earth Charter, a manifesto of green revolution co-signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, as a document that “asked us to leave behind a period of self-destruction and make a new start.”
