Net Zero Watch | 18 July 2022
“Just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country, far behind worries about inflation and the economy. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.” — The New York Times, 17 July 2022
1) Despite the heatwave, Net Zero is all but over
The New York Times, 17 July 2022
2) Winning: Net Zero slumps to bottom of Tory members’ priority list
The Times, 18 July 2022
3) Dutch farmer revolt against harsh climate law just the beginning, experts say: ‘There will be unrest all over’
Fox News, 17 July 2022
4) New study finds that each year almost 80 times more Britons die from cold than from heat
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 7 July 2022
5) Brendan O’Neill: The heatwave green hysteria is out of control
The Spectator, 18 July 2022
6) Editorial: We must learn to adapt to climate change
The Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2022
7) Hugo Gurdon: The real-world consequences of green extremism
The Washington Examiner, 13 July 2022
8) Javier Blas: Europe’s energy crisis will cost you $200 Billion — probably more
Bloomberg, 18 July 2022
9) Pat Michaels RIP
CO2 Coalition, 16 July 2022
1) Despite the heatwave, Net Zero is all but over
The New York Times, 17 July 2022
Summers in Maricopa County, Ariz., have become at times unbearable, Kyle Hawkinson said on Friday. Smog and haze hung heavily over Phoenix, and residents were bracing for fire season, when the heat and air pollution would only grow worse. Climate change, he said, is at least partly to blame.
But when Mr. Hawkinson, a 24-year-old cashier, voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, climate wasn’t really a factor in his choice, he said. As for voting in November, when the Arizona governor’s mansion and one of the state’s Senate seats are on the line, “that’s going to be a big maybe,” he said, adding, “Climate change is always going to be a problem. That’s just a given. Honestly, there’s only so much our leaders of the country can do.”
News on Thursday that even a stripped-down compromise to address a warming planet appeared to be dead was greeted in Washington by brutal condemnations from environmentalists and Democrats, some accusing Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, of dooming human life on Earth. Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, called Mr. Manchin’s decision “nothing short of catastrophic.”
But an electorate already struggling with inflation, exhausted by Covid and adjusting to tectonic changes like the end to constitutionally protected abortions may give the latest Democratic defeat a resigned shrug. And that may be why climate change remains an issue with little political power, either for those pressing for dramatic action or for those standing in the way.
“People are exhausted by the pandemic, they’re terribly disillusioned by the government,” said Anusha Narayanan, climate campaign director for Greenpeace USA, the environmental group known for its guerrilla tactics but now struggling to mobilize supporters. She added: “People see climate as a tomorrow problem. We have to make them see it’s not a tomorrow problem.”
The evidence that a climate crisis is well underway appears to be everywhere: the Great Salt Lake in Utah drying up, severe weather regularly imperiling the electric grid in Texas, wildfires scorching the drought-plagued West, “climate refugees” seeking higher land in Louisiana and tidal floods swamping the streets of Miami.
Still, just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country, far behind worries about inflation and the economy. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.
“This challenge is not as invisible as it used to be, but for most people, even those who live in greater Miami, this isn’t something they encounter every day, whereas their encounters with a gas pump are extremely depressing,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican House member from South Florida who pressed his party to act on climate change. He added: “In healthier economic times, it’s easier to focus on issues like this. Once people get desperate, all that goes out the window.”
Full story
2) Net Zero slumps to bottom of Tory members’ priority list
The Times, 18 July 2022
Conservative Party members care very little about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, polling shows.
Only 4 per cent of those surveyed said that hitting the target of net-zero emissions by 2050 was one of their three priorities for the next Tory leader.
Members said the most pressing concern was winning the next election, followed by controlling immigration and helping families with the cost of living, a YouGov survey for The Times showed.
In April a poll for the think tank Onward found that 64 per cent of all voters supported the government’s plans to hit net zero. Nine per cent were opposed.
In the YouGov poll, 56 per cent of the Tory party members surveyed said that winning the next election was the most important issue. Hitting net zero came bottom of a list of ten policy areas, behind cutting personal taxes, increasing defence spending and strengthening Britain’s global standing.
Alok Sharma, the cabinet minister who led the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow last year, has threatened to resign in protest at “lukewarm” commitments by Tory leadership candidates on the environment. He said that the failure of the five remaining contenders to commit themselves unequivocally to net zero emissions by 2050 risked causing “incredible damage” to British diplomacy.
Sharma told The Observer: “Anyone aspiring to lead our country needs to demonstrate that they take this issue incredibly seriously, that they’re willing to continue to lead and take up the mantle that Boris Johnson started off. I want to see candidates very proactively set out their support for our net-zero agenda for green growth. This is absolutely a leadership issue.”
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, who came third in the first and second ballots of Tory MPs on Wednesday and Thursday, has promised to suspend the green energy levy to help households struggling with the cost of living. This would cost £4.2 billion a year.
Sharma said that the policy would not address the real cause of higher bills. “We need to very clearly understand what is actually driving the price of energy. It isn’t green levies, it is the wholesale gas price,” he said.
In 2019 the government committed itself to the 2050 target via an amendment to the Climate Change Act. Other candidates who have suggested they might change environmental policies if elected Tory leader include Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat. Badenoch called the 2050 target “arbitrary”. Tugendhat is reported to have told a hustings of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers that he thought the date should be delayed. However, he later reaffirmed his commitment to the target.
Asked if he would consider resigning if a candidate who was weak on net zero were elected, Sharma, 54, said: “I don’t rule anything out and I don’t rule anything in.”
3) Dutch farmer revolt against harsh climate law just the beginning, experts say: ‘There will be unrest all over’
Fox News, 17 July 2022
A series of farmer-led demonstrations against a government climate rule in the Netherlands could be the beginning of a global movement, according to experts interviewed by Fox News Digital.
The Dutch government issued a plan in June laying out nitrogen emission reductions, largely targeting the nation’s agriculture industry which produces an outsized shared of such emissions, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FSA). The government, though, directly acknowledged that “there is not a future for all” farmers to continue their business under the proposal.
In response, farmers throughout the country have reportedly taken to the streets in recent weeks, blocking roads to airports and deliveries to food distribution depots. A State Department spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital that the U.S. is monitoring the situation and encouraging both sides to reach an agreement soon.
“I really understand their anger,” Marcel Crok, a Dutch science writer and co-founder of the Climate Intelligence Foundation, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “The farmers are also angry because they say, ‘we are the only sector who get all the blame.’ What about industry? What about the traffic? Maybe we should just ban all the cars in the Netherlands because they also emit [nitrogen].”
“This plan in practice means that, in certain areas, farmers have to reduce their nitrogen emissions by 70%,” he continued. “That means they simply have to quit.”
The proposal to sharply cut nitrogen emissions is tied to a 2019 Dutch court decision forcing the nation’s government to take more aggressive measures to curb nitrogen emissions. The Netherlands, though, has heavily regulated agriculture emissions since the 1990s and farmers have largely complied with such rules, Crok said.
[ ]( https://www.foxnews.com/world/dutch-leader-rioters-netherlands-idiots )
The Netherlands emits a large quantity of nitrogen because of its massive agriculture industry which accounts for about 87% of the country’s 124 million kilograms of annual ammonia emissions, the FSA report showed. The nation exported a whopping $26.8 billion worth of food products despite having a relatively tiny population compared to other major producers, according to World Bank data.
“It is not very rational to curb the Dutch agriculture if you realize that they have the highest production per acre in the world and therefore the environmental load per kilogram food is lower than elsewhere,” Simon Rozendaal, a Dutch journalist and chemist, told Fox News Digital. “So, in a sense Dutch agriculture is a benefit for climate as well as biodiversity.”
Experts also argued that the farmers’ actions in the Netherlands mimicked previous protests around the world and could foreshadow similar uprisings against government overreach. For example, the so-called “yellow vest” movement in France began as a protest against increased nationwide fuel taxes.
“This is literally communism,” Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek told Fox News Digital in an interview. “If the state says, ‘we are going to take your private property away for the sake of a greater good,’ then the state has the prerogative to create crises to strip you of your rights. That’s what’s happening here.”
Vlaardingerbroek said the farmers’ reaction to government actions should “absolutely” be a warning for other governments pursuing similar agendas.
“This will definitely affect ordinary civilians,” she continued. “It’s part of a global agenda, so everyone around the world, especially Western countries, should be aware that this is something that is not just about the Dutch government. This is part of the ‘2030 agenda,’ this is part of the ‘great reset.’”
Similar protests could soon happen in the U.K. and parts of the European Union where natural gas and energy costs are near historic levels, according to Benny Peiser, the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. In the U.K., increased prices are expected to send 24% of households, or about 6.5 million households, into fuel poverty.
“The issue is that despite this growing energy crisis in Europe, some governments still prioritize the climate agenda which makes energy ever more expensive, or which forces farmers to close their farms because that is the top priority, still, for a number of governments,” Peiser told Fox News Digital in an interview. “This whole green agenda is causing huge burdens.”
“The Dutch are driven mad by these policies because it’s killing their businesses and the farmers are fighting back big time,” he said. “This is what’s going to happen all over Europe. I have no doubt that, come winter and millions of families can’t heat their homes or pay their bills anymore, that there will be unrest all over Europe.”
In addition, over the weekend, thousands of citizens in Sri Lanka stormed the private residence of the nation’s prime minister, forcing him and the country’s president to resign. The protesters were reportedly angry with an ongoing economic downturn and fuel shortage.
Myron Ebell, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, noted that the Sri Lankan government also banned chemical fertilizers which environmentalists have blamed for water pollution. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the country’s now-ousted president, remarked that such products have “led to adverse health and environmental impacts” during a speech at a United Nations conference last year.
“Of course, all the crop yields have collapsed, they don’t have any tea to sell because the tea harvest is so low,” Ebell told Fox News Digital. “So, they have no revenues to buy stuff from overseas and their own food production for people to eat in Sri Lanka is not there. They’re starving to death.”
“This is all the result of a government decision to limit the access to commercial fertilizer,” he added. “There is a connection with the Dutch movement because it is about ‘you got to start using less.’”
4) Reality check: New study finds that each year almost 80 times more Britons die from cold than from heat
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 7 July 2022
Each year in England and Wales, there were on average nearly 800 excess deaths associated with heat and over 60,500 associated with cold between 2000 and 2019, according to a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health.
The study, which is the most comprehensive assessment of mortality risks related to outdoor temperature across the two countries, found that exposure to both heat and cold is associated with substantial excess mortality, but with important differences across geographical areas and population sub-groups.
The study was led by researchers from the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), in collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency and researchers from several European universities.
The team found that London had the highest heat-related mortality rate, with 3.21 excess deaths per 100,000 people, which translates to 170 heat-related excess deaths each year. Heat-related risks were also much greater in urban areas across the two countries.
In contrast, the risk of death associated with the cold was highest in the North East of England and Wales, with an excess mortality rate of 140.45 deaths and 136.95 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively. London had the lowest risk associated with cold temperatures, with 113.97 deaths per 100,000 people (almost 5800 cold-related excess deaths each year).
Full story
5) Brendan O’Neill: The heatwave green hysteria is out of control
The Spectator, 18 July 2022
The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become.
If you find yourself wondering over the next few days why it is so swelteringly hot, I have an answer for you. It’s because of rich people. It’s because of those wealthy elites with all their gas-guzzling vehicles and reckless holidaymaking. It’s their fault you’re sweating on the Tube.
This infantile claim really is being made, and by supposedly serious politicians. Labour’s Richard Burgon, over on his Instagram account, is wringing his no doubt sweaty hands over the filthy rich folk who apparently landed us in this weather apocalypse.
‘As we face 40C temperatures and the first ever Red Extreme Heat Warning, remember this climate crisis is driven by the wealthy’, he cries. His stern words are accompanied, naturally, by that Met Office map showing half of Britain coloured dark red – the hellish hue that has been chosen to illustrate how dire our predicament has allegedly become.
Is anyone else tiring of all this green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?
The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become. Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth. These people really do view hot weather as an indictment of humanity, and a forewarning of the imminent heat death of our world that we’ve brought about with all our evil pollution and consumption.
They’re all at it. Caroline Lucas says, ‘The climate emergency is right here, right now’. One observer describes Europe as a ‘continent on fire’ – which just isn’t true, is it? – and says the hot weather is proof of ‘the ravages of climate change’. The words ‘heatwave hell’ are appearing everywhere, and many in the opinion-forming set know exactly who’s responsible for this hell: me and you and everyone else who has dared to live modern, technological lives.
This isn’t the first time a weather event has been depicted as a hell of man’s own making. When the latest IPCC report was published last year, hell talk was widespread. ‘If we do not halt our emissions soon, our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth’, said an Oxford prof. And of course we brought all this fiery punishment upon ourselves just as surely as Sodom and Gomorrah invited God’s divine retribution by being so perverted. We are ‘guilty as hell’, the Guardian’s environment editor cried, sounding for all the world like one of those crackpot millenarian preachers you’d see on street corners in the old days.
To my mind, there could be no better proof that climate-change activism has become an End of Days cult than the fact that its chief ideologues are now even incapable of enjoying hot weather. They feel the sun’s rays on their faces and all they can think about is the Armageddon that the modern masses have created with their cheap flights and their 4X4s and their addiction to disposable fashion.
When you see everything as a sign, as further proof of your own apocalyptic belief system, you have a problem.
Let’s have some perspective. Propagandistic terms like ‘extreme weather’ and ‘Weather of Mass Destruction’ are meant to whip up fear in the populace every time there’s sunshine or floods. And yet, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, the number of people dying in climate-related disasters has plummeted spectacularly over the past hundred years.
In the 1920s, close to 500,000 people died every year in storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves. In 2020, just 14,000 people died as a result of such natural calamities. That means global annual deaths from climate disasters have fallen by 96 per cent. The modernity that eco-warriors so disdain has actually helped to protect humanity from the violent whims of Mother Nature.
Lomborg also points out that in most parts of the world, cold deaths ‘vastly outweigh’ heat deaths. So while the warming of the planet might increase heatwaves, it will reduce coldwaves. Which will be very good for human life. Are we allowed to look on the bright side anymore?
This isn’t the first time extreme weather events have been blamed on wicked human beings, whether it’s Richard Burgon’s wealthy elites or just people in general driving their diesel cars and taking two easyJet flights a year. No, in the Middle Ages, too, scapegoats were often sought whenever there was a scary climatic event.
As the German historian Wolfgang Behringer has documented, in the 14th and 15th centuries ‘unnatural climatic phenomena’ were often blamed on ‘a great conspiracy of witches’. During the Little Ice Age in particular, when crops failed in many parts of Europe, there was a frenzy of witch-hunting. Some in society ‘held the witches directly responsible for the high frequency of climatic anomalies’.
Sound familiar? I definitely hear echoes of that old, regressive belief that sinister people are responsible for weird weather in today’s attempt to pin heatwaves on the rich or on coal-mining or on motorists. Environmentalism has rehabilitated in pseudo-scientific form the age-old instinct to find the witch or the sinner who is to blame for society’s misfortunes.
Everyone needs to calm down. We’re safer from weather than we have ever been. It’s sunny. Go outside. Sit in the shade. Have an ice-cream.
6) Editorial: We must learn to adapt to climate change
The Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2022
Governments have decided to prioritise reversing warming, which is probably not possible, rather than adapting to it
It’s hot. On that everyone is agreed. Indeed, it is exceptionally hot, not just here but on the continent where temperatures have been above 40C in parts of southern France and the Iberian peninsula for a fortnight.
The UK’s highest ever reading of 38.7C set in 2019 looks almost certain to be surpassed on Monday or Tuesday somewhere in eastern England. More alarmingly, forecasters say the temperature will peak at a over 40C for the first time since records began.
Mercifully, this extreme heat is expected to last just a few days here in Britain, though it will continue in Europe. By mid-week, the country should be back to enjoying pleasantly warm summer temperatures with even some much-needed rain forecast.
Despite its predicted early end this heatwave has inevitably triggered the reaction we have come to expect from health agencies, transport bosses and other authorities on whom we depend.
As with the mere threat of snow in winter, plans are made in advance not to help people get around but to encourage them not to go out at all. This tendency, which has been apparent for some years, was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, whose restrictions were eased a year ago tomorrow only to be partially reinstated a few months later.
The default response to any prospect of illness or discomfort has been to close down rather than endeavour to stay open. Yet people are capable of looking after their day-to-day health requirements in hot weather without constantly being hectored to carry water, apply sun cream and close the curtains. Even before the hot weather arrived, trains were being cancelled, schools were shutting down and the country was once again urged to stop as much activity as possible.
As with Covid, this is a luxury only available to those who can work online. Millions of people who have no choice but to go to work to man shops and drive delivery vans to provide for those staying home have to endure the heat.
If there is one lesson to learn from the pandemic surely it is that telling people to stay home is not a rational policy. Taking sensible precautions is one thing; but the long-term impact of the lockdowns on health, economic well-being and the education of our children has been immense and arguably caused more harm than the virus itself. We should not repeat those mistakes whenever there is an extreme weather event.
However, it would be wrong to dismiss this heat as an aberration. Three of the UK’s five highest temperatures have been recorded since 2015. Europe has seen a number of unprecedented hot spells, with the current heatwave causing deaths among vulnerable people in countries like Portugal and Spain well used to dealing with hot weather. (By contrast with here, the latest leg of the Tour de France went ahead in 40C heat without riders or spectators being told to stay indoors.)
The long-term ramifications of climate change and how to address them will have a great impact on our lives. Governments have effectively decided to prioritise reversing warming, which is probably not possible, rather than adapting to it.
The problem with the former is that there are costs in terms of green levies and taxes which politicians then shy away from despite purporting to support the overall goal.
This is playing into the Tory leadership election, with contenders under pressure to dump the net zero approach. Yet while the UK is sticking to this ambition, Germany, which shut down its nuclear plants, is reviving its fossil fuels industries.
Faced with having to wean itself off dependency on Russian gas because of the war in Ukraine, Germany is now reopening coal mines and firing up oil plants to make up the shortfall. Chancellor Olaf Scholz says this is a temporary expedient. We shall see.
The climate is unquestionably changing. The issue is how to deal with the consequences. There may well be more droughts, which means that governments should be looking to improve reservoir capacity and the ability to move water from areas that have plenty. Schools and transport systems may need to have air conditioning.
Government agencies need to be more creative in their responses to expected events whether it be a few hot days or the resurgence of a virus. Telling people to hide away may be an easy thing to do but it is not a sensible or realistic policy.
7) Hugo Gurdon: The real-world consequences of green extremism
The Washington Examiner, 13 July 2022
Extreme environmentalism is an ideology that cares little for human life, even regards it as a blight on the Earth that should be reduced. It wants less economic growth, less entrepreneurial spirit, less development, less energy, less safety, less food, less comfort.
Glorious pictures from the edge of the universe have arrived on Earth just when events here force us to consider the possibility that governments are run by aliens. They are so out of touch with common sense that they must come from other planets.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a wonder of human ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, and creative curiosity, is revealing the birth of galaxies to a world in which, by contrast, overreaching oligarchs and bossy bureaucrats constrict the actions of ordinary people trying to make their own lives and the lives of others better.
Much of the world groans under immiserating rules handed down by a “theory class,” even though they obviously don’t work. The accolade for the most disastrous policy outcome is hotly contested, and Wednesday’s grim revelation of 9.1% inflation shows that President Joe Biden’s spending agenda is a strong contender. But even that might not take the cake.
Worse, perhaps, are the results of hyper-alarmism on climate change. Excessive environmental policies are proving disastrous worldwide. Suddenly, all the green chickens are coming home to roost.
Intolerant “liberals” keen to “save the planet” are ruining it — officiously preventing the poor from lifting themselves out of poverty, forcing wealthy nations to retreat from comfort and efficiency into backwardness, even killing people by the hundreds of thousands.
Humankind long ago acquired the technological ability to thrive in all climes, but citizens of the most advanced nations must now check the weather forecast to know if their fridges and household lights will work or be shut down in an electricity blackout.
In Britain, overdependence on wind turbines built to cut carbon emissions leaves inhabitants at the mercy of the weather. When the wind doesn’t blow, the economy doesn’t work.
Likewise, in Germany, the world’s fourth-biggest economy, calm summer air means turbines stand idle, incapable of producing electricity and jacking up energy prices irrespective of the nation’s equally asinine overdependence on gas supplies from a recalcitrant Russia.
Excessively tight emissions rules, which amount to “anti-farming policies,” have triggered protests across Europe. They started in the Netherlands, where 30% of farms might be put out of business. And they have spread to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland, where farmers fear being subjected to the same privations.
If, as expected, bureaucratic meddling slashes Dutch output — the Netherlands is one of the biggest and most efficient farming nations in the world — production will shift to less efficient, more polluting producers elsewhere.
This is similar to the attack that green zealots in the Democratic Party launched against American energy production at the start of the Biden administration. By shutting down energy leases and discouraging investment in the United States because of exaggerated and parochial climate concerns, the green oligarchy transfers production and wealth to dirtier producers overseas, such as Russia.
As a result, gas prices across the country are higher than they’ve ever been and getting higher still. Basic energy costs, such as heat and air conditioning, are also more expensive. And yet California Democrats’ response to this crisis has been to pass local ordinances forcing citizens to phase out natural gas , one of the most affordable sources of energy, altogether over the next several years.
The results of shortsighted, self-defeating enviro-extremism are bad enough in rich nations. But they are even worse in the undeveloped world. In Sri Lanka, which banned chemical fertilizers in a fit of adherence to global green pressure, crops collapsed and food inflation spiked to 80% in June. The result has been a public revolt, including the overthrow of the president and an occupation of his palace by disgruntled citizens.
The specter of starvation is now being reported from Africa, and the latest analysis from the U.N. World Food Program suggests that 670 million people, 8% of the world’s population, will face hunger by the end of the decade.
The World Health Organization calculates that 439,000 Africans die every year from indoor air pollution because they are forced — for cooking, lighting, and heating — to burn charcoal and cattle dung, which one researcher compared to smoking 400 cigarettes per hour in the home. The reason Africans still use these primitive methods to generate energy is that green ideologues in rich nations won’t allow them to get financing to build coal-fired power stations.
Extreme environmentalism is an ideology that cares little for human life, even regards it as a blight on the Earth that should be reduced. Its instinctive sympathies are against our species. It wants less economic growth, less entrepreneurial spirit, less development, less energy, less safety, less food, less comfort.
Who suffers? Those in poor nations, of course, and we in the rich nations that impose our obsessions on ourselves and on others wherever we can.
But we can’t impose them everywhere. So, who doesn’t suffer? Our enemies, China in particular, that watch our self-harming foolishness with delight and perhaps a little astonishment. Beijing, which in recent years built more coal-fired power stations than the rest of the world combined, sits back and watches as the self-doubting, self-hating West cedes its prosperity and global leadership.
We’re now able, with our dazzling technology, to look billions of light years from the surface of our planet all the way to the rim of outer space and to peer back as far as the beginning of the universe. But here on Earth, we blind ourselves with ideology and cannot see what’s staring us in the face.
8) Javier Blas: Europe’s energy crisis will cost you $200 Billion — probably more
Bloomberg, 18 July 2022
Governments have to prop up failing utilities if they want to keep people’s lights and heating on. But the bill will ultimately fall on taxpayers.
It’s a falling chain of energy dominoes — one in which each tile is worth many billions of euros. A failed utility here, a nation’s supply there. When the dust settles, the total bill for rescuing the European energy market this winter will easily top $200 billion.
This may sound flippant, and it’s admittedly a rough estimate. But the calculus is conservative and based on what we know today. It doesn’t cover the worst-case scenario of both Russia fully shutting down natural gas supply to Europe and a colder-than-average winter.
Very few politicians seem to grasp with the magnitude of the coming crisis and its costs, with Emmanuel Macron of France and Olaf Scholz of Germany being among the only ones that appear to get it now. (The rest, in many cases, remain distracted by domestic politics.) The European Union has called for an emergency meeting of energy ministers later this month. But this should precede a larger heads-of-government summit focused on energy before the summer break.
The EU will have to decide on a big energy savings program, including a public campaign to support it, and make clear that nations will help each other by sharing the little gas that will be available. This means inviting the UK, Switzerland and Norway to the table in Brussels too.
As forward natural gas and electricity prices continue to climb, more European utilities and energy retailers will struggle. Consider Germany, where the one-year forward electricity contract surged last week to an all-time high of more than 350 euros ($352) per megawatt hour, up 750% from an average of 41 euros between 2010 and 2020. Natural gas prices for 2023 in Europe have surged recently, too.
The only chance of survival for the utilities is to pass the huge jump in wholesale prices onto their customers. But that only moves the bailout down the chain, as households and businesses would then face unaffordable bills and need government help.
Ultimately, taxpayers will bear the cost — either directly and immediately, via higher retail power and gas prices, or later, and over the years, via higher taxes to pay for the bailouts. European governments should be upfront about the costs: They can win the argument that this is money well spent to stop Vladimir Putin.
Let’s start from the utility side. Germany’s Uniper SE, the biggest buyer of Russian gas, has all but failed. It recently asked for a government bailout, and preliminary estimates put the bill at 10 billion euros. That’s likely to prove conservative. Electricite de France SA has failed as a reliable producer of electricity and needs help. Paris, which already owns a majority stake, will renationalize the rest, at a cost of at least 8 billion euros.
And Uniper and EDF are just the tip of the iceberg — two utilities among the dozens that serve more than 200 million households in the EU and UK. The majority perhaps will weather the storm. But many others are going to need help. At the very least, they will require state-backed loans and other government guarantees to buy super-expensive gas in the spot market to replace the loss of Russian gas. At worst, they will need to be nationalized, if only temporarily.
The state-backed loans aren’t trivial. Earlier this month, the Czech government gave the country’s state-controlled utility CEZ an emergency loan of 3 billion euros. That’s for a company that serves a country of little more than 10 million people. The German government, via its state-owned bank KwF, has already given 15 billion euros in loans to the country’s gas-market operator to buy gas and fill up storage ahead of winter. Whether those loans will ever be repaid is a question mark.
Now let’s look at the households. The UK is paradigmatic of the problem. In February, London announced a multi-billion-pound bailout to cushion the impact of a 54% increase in the country’s retail energy cap — a limit on how much utilities can charge families per year for electricity and gas. Back then, the price cap was rising from 1,277 pounds ($1,512) to 1,971 pounds per year, effective April 1. From October, the price cap is set to jump to about 3,300 pounds per year. The near 70% increase is set to be announced in early August.
Yet the median pre-tax annual household income in the UK is £31,770. That means a typical household will spend more than 10% of its income paying for electricity and gas — that’s the standard definition of energy poverty. Without government money, families will default on their bills, creating a debt problem for their energy providers. Either London bails out the families, or it has to bail out the utilities.
The likely size of the British government’s help? Earlier this year, a £693 increase in the price cap triggered a £9.1 billion handout. Back-of-the-envelop math suggests the £1,300 or so increase that’s coming would trigger a 17 billion-pound bailout.
Factor in just these known examples, and a $200 billion bill in European bailouts, nationalizations, state-backed loans and the like doesn’t sound that flippant anymore.
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9) Pat Michaels RIP
CO2 Coalition, 16 July 2022
It is with a heavy heart that we report on the death of dear friend and colleague Pat Michaels on July 16, 2022 (born February 15, 1950).
Patrick Michaels obtained a B. A. in biological science in 1971 and an M. S. in biology in 1975 from the University of Chicago, and in 1979 he obtained his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His doctoral thesis was titled Atmospheric anomalies and crop yields in North America.
Patrick J. Michaels was a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He was a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for 30 years. Michaels was a contributing author and is a reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
His writing was been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science, as well as in popular serials worldwide. He was the author or editor of nine books on climate and its impact, and he was an author of the climate “paper of the year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers in 2004. He appeared on most of the worldwide major media.
Dr. Michaels was Senior Fellow at the CO2 Coalition and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
He remained very active up to his last days. He had just completed his review and comments on the USGCR decadal plan and filed them on Thursday. He met with Coalition staff just the day before his passing to discuss his next venture looking at regional assessments of changing climate/CO2 on the Midwest.
He leaves a legacy of sound science and dedication to the scientific process. He will be missed terribly.
1992 – Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming
2000 – The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming
2004 – Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media
2005 – Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming
2009 – Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know
2011 – Climate Coup: Global Warmings Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives
2015 – Climate Change: The Facts
2016 – Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything
2019 – Scientocracy: The Tangled Web of Public Science and Public Policy
