It’s All Over: EU Scraps Green Transport Target Post-2020

GWPF | 4 May 2016

Donald Trump’s Election Would Derail Obama’s Paris Deal, Warns French Foreign Minister

EU laws requiring member states to use “at least 10%” renewable energy in transport will be scrapped after 2020, the European Commission confirmed, hoping to set aside a protracted controversy surrounding the environmental damage caused by biofuels. –Frédéric Simon, EurActiv.com, 4 May 2016

The election of Donald Trump would derail the landmark agreement on climate change reached in Paris last December, the architect of the accord has warned.Trump is now virtually certain to be the Republican candidate for president and has said “I am not a great believer in manmade climate change”, leading to fears he would attempt to unpick the historic agreement if he became president. Without naming Trump, the former French foreign minister Laurent Fabius told an audience in London: “Think about the impact of the coming US presidential elections. If a climate change denier was to be elected, it would threaten dramatically global action against climate disruption.” He said: “We must not think that everything is settled.” –Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 4 May 2016

1) It’s All Over: EU Scraps Green Transport Target Post-2020
EurActiv.com, 4 May 2016

2) Donald Trump’s Election Would Derail Obama’s Paris Deal, Warns French Foreign Minister
The Guardian, 4 May 2016

3) Another One Bites The Dust: One Of World’s Biggest Solar Manufacturer teetering Toward Bankruptcy
Bloomberg, 2 May 2016

4) Wind And Solar Energy Are A Waste Of Money, Prof Sir David MacKay Said In Final Interview
The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2016

5) Pascal’s Wager For The Global Warming Religion
The Federalist, 3 May 2016

6) Prophets Of Doom In High Places
Daily Maverick,3 May 2016

Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., once the world’s biggest solar manufacturer, plunged the most in more than seven months after signaling it may be teetering toward bankruptcy. Yingli declined 21 percent to $3.60 at the close in New York, the most since Sept. 29. That followed an 8.1 percent drop Friday after the Chinese solar company acknowledged “substantial doubt as to its ability to continue as a going concern.” “It looks like they are not getting bailed out and they will need to file for bankruptcy,” Gordon Johnson, an analyst at Axiom Capital Management, said in an e-mail Monday. –Joe Ryan, Bloomberg, 2 May 2016

Wind turbines and solar panels are a waste of money if Britain wants reliable low carbon electricity supplies through the winter, the late Professor Sir David MacKay said in his final interview. Prof MacKay, who served as chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change for five years until 2014, died from cancer last month. He criticised the “appalling delusion” that renewable sources of power could simply be scaled up and paired with battery storage to provide all the UK’s energy needs, citing the high costs and large areas of land that would be required. –Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2016

Let’s ask what this abuse of probabilities is meant to accomplish. Like Pascal’s Wager, it is designed to make your ability to imagine a scary scenario — believe this or there will be horrible, horrible consequences — into an argument to stampede everyone into compliance. It is similar to the “strong” versions of the Precautionary Principle, where the mere ability to imagine negative consequences from a new technology compels you to ban it. This kind of Pascal’s-Wager-for-global-warming is part of a larger environmentalist program: a perverse attempt to take our sense of the actual risks and benefits for human life and turn it upside down. The overwhelming evidence is that industry, technology, and wealth decrease the chance of random natural events having catastrophic consequences by making us far better equipped to withstand these disasters. That’s what the environmentalists are trying to make us forget, in order to scare us into sacrificing those advantages to their new environmentalist religion. –Robert Tracinski, The Federalist, 3 May 2016

Before climate change, there was the population explosion. Predicting disaster for humanity and environmental doom became the means by which government power could be expanded, even if the record of such prophesies is dismal. The record of populist predictions about the evils of modern society is terrible. The most alarming predictions, which garner the most headlines and have the most impact on public policy, never come to pass. Perennial pessimism is nothing but paranoid neurosis. Prophesies about the catastrophes that would follow population growth have long been both shrill and high-profile. Yet they simply failed to materialise. The prophets of doom wish they would be quietly forgotten, and for the most part they have been. But they shouldn’t be, when the very same fearmongers remain in positions of influence or power. –Ivo Vegter, Daily Maverick,3 May 2016

1) It’s All Over: EU Scraps Green Transport Target Post-2020
EurActiv.com, 4 May 2016

Frédéric Simon

The European Commission will table a revision of the Renewable Energy Directive at the end of 2016, aiming to further push renewable sources like wind and solar across the European Union.

On transport, “we will look specifically at the challenges and opportunities of renewable fuels including biofuels”, said Marie C. Donnelly, Director for Renewables at the European Commission.

The current directive, adopted in 2008, requires each EU member state to have “at least 10%” renewable energy used in transport by 2020 – including from biofuels and other sources like green electricity.

This has drawn criticism in Britain, where reaching the 10% target will require doubling current biofuel supply, adding a further penny per litre on pump prices, according to a leaked memo by the Department for Transport.

But the 10% target will be dropped in the new directive, Donnelly told a breakfast seminar organised at the European Parliament on Tuesday (3 May).

“What’s not going to be in the text is a target for the transport sector,” she said, confirming a decision by EU leaders in October 2014 to have only one target for renewable energies across the 28 EU member states that “will not be translated into nationally binding targets”.

“The continuation of the sub-target for the transport sector is something that has not been accepted and will not be continued in our proposal at the end of this year,” she told the event, organised by Kaidi, a Finnish firm producing biodiesel from wood-based biomass.

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2) Donald Trump’s Election Would Derail Obama’s Paris Deal, Warns French Foreign Minister
The Guardian, 4 May 2016

Fiona Harvey

The election of Donald Trump would derail the landmark agreement on climate change reached in Paris last December, the architect of the accord has warned.

Trump is now virtually certain to be the Republican candidate for president and has said “I am not a great believer in manmade climate change”, leading to fears he would attempt to unpick the historic agreement if he became president.

Without naming Trump, the former French foreign minister Laurent Fabius told an audience in London: “Think about the impact of the coming US presidential elections. If a climate change denier was to be elected, it would threaten dramatically global action against climate disruption.”

He said: “We must not think that everything is settled.”

In response to a speech by Barack Obama at the opening of the Paris climate summit, Trump said: “I think one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics, in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama’s statement that our No 1 problem is global warming.”

Under the Paris agreement, 195 nations have agreed to limit global warming to no more than 2C, with an aspirational limit of 1.5C, in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

At a ceremony in New York last month, 175 countries formally accepted the Paris accord, bringing it closer to coming into force. The UN is now pressing to begin the implementation of the deal, needing the formal agreement of countries with 55% of global emissions, which will require countries to take action on emissions and to provide financial assistance to the developing world.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the two remaining Democratic candidates, are both in favour of action on greenhouse gas emissions and support the Paris accord.

The US Congress, dominated by Republicans, may also oppose the actions needed on emissions to fulfil US commitments under the Paris agreement, even if a Democrat is elected president in November. However, Fabius noted, the deal was carefully crafted in Paris to ensure that the US president would have the authority to sign up to it.

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3) Another One Bites The Dust: One Of World’s Biggest Solar Manufacturer Teetering Toward Bankruptcy
Bloomberg, 2 May 2016

Joe Ryan

Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., once the world’s biggest solar manufacturer, plunged the most in more than seven months after signaling it may be teetering toward bankruptcy.

Yingli Green Energy Holding Co Ltd (Adr) Stock Chart May 2015 to May 2016

Yingli declined 21 percent to $3.60 at the close in New York, the most since Sept. 29. That followed an 8.1 percent drop Friday after the Chinese solar company acknowledged “substantial doubt as to its ability to continue as a going concern.”

Yingli said Friday that it’s still in talks with creditors about repaying loans due in two weeks, and its losses for 2015 probably would widen because of a series of write-offs, the sliding price of solar panels and declining shipments caused by a shortage of working capital.

“It looks like they are not getting bailed out and they will need to file for bankruptcy,” Gordon Johnson, an analyst at Axiom Capital Management, said in an e-mail Monday.

Full story

4) Wind And Solar Energy Are A Waste Of Money, Prof Sir David MacKay Said In Final Interview
The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2016

Emily Gosden

Wind turbines and solar panels are a waste of money if Britain wants reliable low carbon electricity supplies through the winter, the late Professor Sir David MacKay said in his final interview.

Prof MacKay, who served as chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change for five years until 2014, died from cancer last month.

In an interview with the science writer Mark Lynas, filmed 11 days before his death and released posthumously, Prof Mackay said the “sensible thing” for the UK to do was to focus on nuclear and on carbon capture and storage technology, which traps the emissions from power stations.

He criticised the “appalling delusion” that renewable sources of power could simply be scaled up and paired with battery storage to provide all the UK’s energy needs, citing the high costs and large areas of land that would be required.

Prof MacKay was renowned in the energy world for his book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air, which examined the potential limitations of renewable power, but said he had “always tried to avoid advocating particular solutions”.

However in his final interview – in which he stressed he would be “content with any plan that adds up” – he set out for the first time his own recommendation for “the rational thing to do in the UK”, explaining: “Maybe [as] the time is getting thinner, I should call a spade a spade.”

“For the UK, I think we want a zero carbon solution and it has to work in the winter,” he said.

The British public also seemed to care about the cost of energy, he said, so “we should be looking for a low carbon solution that is low cost”.

Prof MacKay said: “If you just cost-optimise and say it has to keep working in the winter, even if there’s no wind for seven days at time and obviously no sun… the sensible thing to do for a country like the UK, I think, is to focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS), which the world needs anyway, and nuclear.

“Then if you ask, what is the optimal amount of wind and solar to add in as well? The answer is going to be almost zero.”

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5) Pascal’s Wager For The Global Warming Religion
The Federalist, 3 May 2016

Robert Tracinski

Apologists for the global warming religion borrow from the lamest argument for the existence of God.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) studying the cycloid, engraved on the tablet he is holding in his left hand.

Do you freaking love science? Then you might be a big enough sucker to fall for a claim like this one: “Across the span of their lives, the average American is more than five times likelier to die during a human-extinction event than in a car crash.” Which was actually made by an environmentalist group called the Global Challenges Foundation and reported with a straight face in The Atlantic.

What this report means by a “human-extinction event” is one “that would wipe out more than 10 percent of Earth’s human population.” Not exactly extinction, but I’ll grant that it’s big and horrible enough. Nominally, they are referring to rare and unusual cataclysms that we can’t do much about, like supervolcanoes and killer asteroids. But you can guess at what they’re really aiming. The Global Challenges Foundation describes its mission as raising “awareness of the Global Catastrophic Risks. Primarily focused on climate change …” Bet you saw that one coming.

The fact that such claims are taken seriously tells you a lot about how global warming has become a religion with a veneer of science — down to the specific form of argument that it borrows from religion in this case.

Consider the peculiar, probabilistic nature of the claim being made here. They are pretty obviously fudging the probabilities in both directions. A fatal car accident seems like an ordinary and commonplace danger, but it is actually quite rare these days, after decades of steep declines in traffic fatality rates. (Keep that in mind, because it will be relevant later.) But at least it can be measured and quantified based on actual past data from experience. The basis for calculations about “human-extinction events” is a lot fuzzier. But it doesn’t really matter, because even though they are actually far rarer than car crashes, when a “human-extinction event” happens, then by definition everybody dies. So the sheer scale of the disaster makes up for its extreme rarity.

Everything Old Is New Again

There is something that sounded familiar to me about this argument, and I realized that it borrows the basic form of Pascal’s Wager, an old and spectacularly unconvincing argument for belief in God. (Go here if you want to give the idea more thought than it probably deserves.) Blaise Pascal’s argument was that even if the existence of God is only a very small probability, the consequences are so spectacularly huge — eternal life if you follow the rules, eternal punishment if you don’t — that it makes even a very small probability seem overwhelmingly important. In effect, Pascal realized that you can make anything look big if you multiply it by infinity. Similarly, this new environmentalist argument assumes that you can make anything look big if you multiply it by extinction.

The basic problem is that this is arbitrary. If you can base an argument on merely the small possibility of the existence of the Christian God, then why couldn’t you base the same argument on Allah or Buddha? And if following the wrong rules can send you to heaven or hell, how does Pascal’s Wager help you decide whether you should follow the Catholic rules or the Protestant rules or how to resolve myriad other theological disputes?

If Pascal’s probabilistic argument works for Christianity, then it also works for Islam, or for secular versions like Roko’s Basilisk. (And yes, an “all-seeing artificial intelligence” is included in this report as a catastrophic possibility, which gives you an idea of how seriously you should take it.) Or it works for global warming, which is exactly how it’s being used here.

Pascal was a great mathematician, but this was an awful abuse of the nascent science of probabilities. (I suspect it’s no great shakes from a religious perspective, either.) First of all, a “probability” is not just anything that you sort of think might happen. Imagination and speculation are not probability. In any mathematical or scientific sense of the word, a probability is something for which you have a real basis to measure its likelihood. Saying you are “95 percent certain” about a scientific theory, as global warming alarmists are apt to do, might make for an eye-catching turn of phrase in press headlines. But it is not an actual number that measures something.

Similarly, when the Global Challenges Foundation “estimates a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years,” based on the Stern Review’s predictions about global warming, the tip-off is the false precision of that extra 0.5 percent. Given the enormous complexity and uncertainty of all the different factors involved, it would be dubious to state a conclusion on the level of precision of one in 10. How much more ridiculous is it to say that it’s not just 10 percent but 9 percent, and not just 9 percent but 9.5 percent. That’s the tell that they’re just making up numbers in an attempt to sound all sciency.

The other rule about using probabilities is that you don’t get to consider one probability in isolation. You have to consider it in the context of other, similar probabilities. If Pascal wants to consider the probability that Christianity is true, he also has to assign a probability to other, conflicting outlooks. Similarly, if you believe that there is a 9.5 percent probability of a global warming apocalypse in the next 100 years, then you also have to look at other competing probabilities. For example, what is the probability that regulations intended to constrict the use of fossil fuels will damage economic growth and prolong widespread global poverty, which will also kill millions of people? (Answer: much higher.)

Or ask this: what is the probability that in the next 100 years, scientists, activists, actors, and politicians will claim a “consensus” in favor of a theory that turns out to be false? Given the long-term historical track record — the flat-earth theory, phlogiston, eugenics, that embarrassing incident in which plate tectonics was dismissed as a crackpot idea — I’m guessing that the probability is way north of 9.5 percent.

The Precautionary Principle

But look, let’s not pick this apart any more. Let’s ask what this abuse of probabilities is meant to accomplish. Like Pascal’s Wager, it is designed to make your ability to imagine a scary scenario — believe this or there will be horrible, horrible consequences — into an argument to stampede everyone into compliance. It is similar to the “strong” versions of the Precautionary Principle, where the mere ability to imagine negative consequences from a new technology compels you to ban it.

This kind of Pascal’s-Wager-for-global-warming is part of a larger environmentalist program: a perverse attempt to take our sense of the actual risks and benefits for human life and turn it upside down. […]

The overwhelming evidence is that industry, technology, and wealth decrease the chance of random natural events having catastrophic consequences by making us far better equipped to withstand these disasters. That’s what the environmentalists are trying to make us forget, in order to scare us into sacrificing those advantages to their new environmentalist religion.

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6) Prophets Of Doom In High Places
Daily Maverick,3 May 2016

Ivo Vegter

The record of populist predictions about the evils of modern society is terrible. The most alarming predictions, which garner the most headlines and have the most impact on public policy, never come to pass. Perennial pessimism is nothing but paranoid neurosis.

Prophesies about the catastrophes that would follow population growth have long been both shrill and high-profile. Yet they simply failed to materialise. The prophets of doom wish they would be quietly forgotten, and for the most part they have been. But they shouldn’t be, when the very same fearmongers remain in positions of influence or power.

In 1967, the brothers William and Paul Paddock wrote a book, calmly entitled Famine 1975! In it, they predict that most nations will be unable to sustain their growing populations by expanding agriculture, leading to a “Time of Famines” within a decade from the book’s publication. They believed that the United States would become the “sole hope of the hungry nations”, but that its charity had to be limited by necessity, forcing it to choose which countries it would simply leave to starve.

The scientific community, far from rejecting the preposterous alarmism, took it seriously. A review in the magazine Science explains: “From its title, one might infer that this book is an attention-seeking potboiler, on one of today’s ever more gripping and therefore popular subjects. It is not. It is deadly serious, a solemn analysis of things to come in the food domain, together with a proposed plan for action in a field where others have none. … All serious students of the plight of the underdeveloped nations agree that famine among the peoples of the underdeveloped nations is invetiable. The US Department of Agriculture, for example, sees 1985 as the beginning of the years of hunger.”

The Paddock brothers may have faded into obscurity, but their book received high praise from a more famous prognosticator of environmental apocalypse. The central thesis of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb (full text) is stated in the prologue: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now.”

Ehrlich’s problem statement was the same as that of the Paddock brothers, but his proposed solutions were different. As suggested in the subtitle, “Population control or race to oblivion?”, Ehrlich was a proponent of penalty taxes on families with more children, levying luxury taxes on childcare products, and incentivising sterilisation after two children. He even suggested putting sterilants in the drinking water, but dismissed the idea as impractical because of the “criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area”.

The book makes no bones about how doomed he thought the world to be: “At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programmes to ‘stretch’ the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programmes will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole.”

He proposed that the United States establish a Department of Population and Environment, which “should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment”.

Despite the stubborn refusal of the population to grow poor and die, half of this wish did come true, and environmental bureaucrats have been spewing forth reams of rules and regulations ever since. Some of them have been sensible and beneficial, but many are driven purely by fear, political opportunism, cronyism, or sheer hunger for power.

As is common, Ehrlich invoked the presumed plight of the next generation, whose future his own generation were presumably destroying: “Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present affluent society. They will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics and economics of the past decade are dead. … We are today involved in the events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe; tomorrow we may be destroyed by them. Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide.”

Almost 50 years later there is no sign of Ehrlich’s dystopian delusions about poverty and famine. Population growth, which peaked in 1963 at 2.2%, has halved. There are fewer poor people now than ever before, and even the poor are far better fed than they were in 1968. Agriculture has been boosted immeasurably by the adoption of modern farming techniques and new techologies, feeding a population of more than 7-billion better than it did a population half this size in 1968. Yet the echoes of Ehrlich’s language are louder than ever. Ironically, the generation that wasn’t yet born in Ehrlich’s day, but are parents and grandparents today, fret just as much about the future they’re bequeathing to their children as Ehrlich himself did.

At the first Earth Day in 1970s, predictions of the Ehrlich variety were commonplace headline-grabbers. According to Senator Gaylord Nelson, who quoted Dr Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian, 80% of all species would be extinct by 2000. Four billion people would starve to death during the 1980s, predicted Ehrlich himself. Kenneth Watt, an ecologist, predicted that the world would be 11 degrees colder by 2000, but that we’d have run out of crude oil.

None of these alarming predictions has come true. […]

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