GWPF | 23 Nov 2014
Obama’s Climate Fiasco Drives Aussies Closer To India & China
Barack Obama defied the advice of his embassy in Canberra to deliver a stinging attack on the Abbott government’s climate policies in Brisbane last weekend. The US embassy, under the leadership of ambassador John Berry, advised the President, through his senior staff, not to couch his climate change comments in a way that would be seen as disobliging to the Abbott government, sources have revealed. Historians of the US-Australia relationship are unable to nominate a case of a visiting president making such a hostile speech for the host government. — Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 23 November 2014
The United States embassy in Canberra advised President Barack Obama not to make the provocative, anti-Abbott speech on climate change which he made at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That the President acted against the advice of his own embassy reveals a deeply divided and in part dysfunctional Obama administration, unable to reconcile its foreign policy objectives and its domestic imperatives. Obama’s self-indulgent folly was in striking contrast to the masterful performances of China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Xi and Modi have both achieved almost everything they wanted from Asia’s season of summits. Obama has achieved almost nothing. –Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 22 November 2014
Germany is the biggest proponent of the green electricity revolution, but this new plant won’t be powered by the sun, wind or woodchips — it will burn dirty old coal. Built by German energy giant RWE at a cost of €2bn (£1.6bn), the plant is no aberration. This year the company, which owns Npower in Britain, and its rivals have poured billions of euros into a fleet of new coal-fired plants, the most polluting form of power generation. When finished they will be capable of supplying more than 8m households. Last year, German carbon dioxide emissions actually rose 1.2%, partly due to the resurgence of coal. –Danny Fortson, The Sunday Times, 23 November 2014
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible. Koningstein and Fork write: “At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”– Lewis Page, The Register, 21 November 2014
1) Obama Ignored US Embassy’s Warnings On Climate Change Speech
The Australian, 23 November 2014
2) Obama’s Climate Fiasco Drives Aussies Closer To India & China
The Australian, 22 November 2014
3) Germany Desperate For More Coal Power To Keep Lights On
The Sunday Times, 23 November 2014
4) Renewable Energy ‘Simply Won’t Work’, Top Google Engineers Conclude
The Register, 21 November 2014
1) Obama Ignored US Embassy’s Warnings On Climate Change Speech
The Australian, 23 November 2014
Greg Sheridan
Barack Obama defied the advice of his embassy in Canberra to deliver a stinging attack on the Abbott government’s climate policies in Brisbane last weekend.
The US embassy, under the leadership of ambassador John Berry, advised the President, through his senior staff, not to couch his climate change comments in a way that would be seen as disobliging to the Abbott government, sources have revealed.
When The Weekend Australian put this information to the US embassy, a spokesman said: “As is the case with all presidential speeches, President Obama’s remarks at the University of Queensland in Brisbane were prepared by the White House.”
It is normal practice when the US President makes an overseas visit that the ambassador in the country he is visiting is consulted about the contents of major speeches. It is unusual, though not unprecedented, for an embassy’s advice to be ignored.
The Obama speech in Brisbane was added to the President’s program at the last minute. During his extensive talks with Tony Abbott in Beijing at APEC, Mr Obama did not make any mention of a desire to make a speech, or of any of the contentious climate change content of the speech.
Only in Naypyidaw, in Myanmar, immediately prior to the leaders travelling to Brisbane for the G20 summit, did the US party demand that the President make a speech and that it be to an audience of young people. At the speech, the President did not acknowledge the presence of Governor-General Peter Cosgrove.
Despite repeated Australian requests, White House officials refused to provide a text of the speech to their Australian hosts in advance, and did not provide a summary of what would be contained in the speech.
Mr Obama’s repeated references to the climate change debate in Australia, his accusation that Australia was an inefficient user of energy and his repeated references to the Great Barrier Reef, which has figured heavily in the climate change debate, have led observers to conclude that the speech was a deliberate swipe at the Abbott government.
Historians of the US-Australia relationship are unable to nominate a case of a visiting president making such a hostile speech for the host government.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has accused Mr Obama of speaking in ignorance about the joint plans by the federal and Queensland governments to act to preserve the Great Barrier Reef. She sent a briefing on the reef to the White House after Mr Obama’s speech was delivered.
Some days before the speech, at the World Parks Conference, Ms Bishop met US Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and gave her the same briefing.
Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek yesterday accused Ms Bishop of “berating” the President and said Ms Bishop had created an “absurd” situation.
Sources in Washington said the Brisbane speech was a sign of deep divisions within the Obama administration over how to deal with Australia, and over Asian policy generally.
Senior US sources said Mr Obama had inadvertently overshadowed all the elements of his speech, which dealt with regional security and America’s position in Asia.
When the White House first proposed the speech, its subject was to be US leadership in Asia. Mr Obama’s speech was in marked contrast to the accomplished speeches, with their careful regional agendas, of China’s President, Xi Jinping, and India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to the Australian parliament. Senior Washington sources told The Weekend Australian of a malaise in Obama administration policy towards Asia and the lack of influence of Asia experts lower down in the US government.
Since the Abbott government was elected last September, there has been a group within the Obama administration that wants to take a tougher public line against Canberra on differences over climate change, in particular the decision to abolish the carbon tax. […]
Mr Obama has previously had a warm personal relationship with Mr Abbott. The President has been a frequent telephone caller to Mr Abbott, almost always with a request for Australian support for a US policy or initiative, from troops for the Middle East, US trade initiatives in Asia, or important regional diplomatic matters, especially those involving security. On every occasion the US President has asked for help, the Australian Prime Minister has provided it.
2) Obama’s Climate Fiasco Drives Aussies Closer To India & China
The Australian, 22 November 2014
Greg Sheridan
The United States embassy in Canberra advised President Barack Obama not to make the provocative, anti-Abbott speech on climate change which he made at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That the President acted against the advice of his own embassy reveals a deeply divided and in part dysfunctional Obama administration, unable to reconcile its foreign policy objectives and its domestic imperatives.
The speech was not only damaging for Tony Abbott, as it will be used by all his opponents on climate change up until the next election, it was a disaster for US foreign policy, because the gratuitous climate change remarks completely overshadowed all the regional and security content which Obama’s foreign policy team wanted to be the main point of his major address on his Asian tour.
Obama’s self-indulgent folly was in striking contrast to the masterful performances of China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Xi and Modi have both achieved almost everything they wanted from Asia’s season of summits. Obama has achieved almost nothing.
The other big winner from this summit season was Abbott. Despite the damage Obama inflicted on him, Abbott emerged from APEC, the East Asia Summit, the G20 summit which he hosted, and the separate bilateral visits of so many world leaders, with huge structural wins.
The free trade agreement with China has the potential to be transformative for Australia. It locks the two nations much more closely together. It contains a host of immensely important specifics, and was accompanied by numerous side agreements.
But the transformative potential lies in the door it opens for Australian business into China’s future. Don’t think for a moment that resources will cease to be at the centre of Australia/China trade. The anti-coal propaganda is fanciful nonsense, believed only by Green dreamers.
Coal will be at the heart of China’s energy generation for decades ahead.
Nonetheless, China is transforming. Coal and iron ore are about building cities. China has now built its cities on a vast scale. Cities are occupied by middle class people. They need high-quality food and high-quality services. The China FTA opens up the services sector in an unprecedented way. That is the future.
The Indian visit also offers to be transformative. Modi likes Abbott. But of course such likes and dislikes are never the real engine of history.
Modi wants India to develop. Modi’s closest friend and partner internationally is Japan’s Shinzo Abe. Abe is Abbott’s closest collaborator in Asia. It was Abe who advised Modi that Australia was a country to take seriously and that Abbott was a PM who could deliver.
Modi believes Australia can be a big part of India’s development.
I attended a small business gathering with Modi in Melbourne. He made a few comments about the need for greener energy, but he also said: “India will have massive requirements for coal and iron ore.” Just in case his interlocutors missed the point, he repeated it: “Whatever we do, we will still need massive amounts of coal and iron ore.”
But Modi understands that India also needs foreign investment and expertise. Since the turn of the century, India has been the second fastest growing economy in the world. Tens, hundreds, of millions of Indians will enter the middle class over the next decade. They offer the same opportunities as the Chinese middle class. Trade Minister Andrew Robb describes the India relationship as being where the Chinese relationship was 15 years ago. Robb is right. The potential, like China 15 years ago, is enormous.
The ambition to complete a free trade agreement between India and Australia by the end of next year is heroic. But it is not impossible. Indeed, one FTA helps produce another. Australia’s success in securing an FTA with South Korea helped motivate Japan. Canberra’s success with Tokyo helped motivate Beijing. Part of India’s motivation is not to be left out of the east Asian economic success story. So the string of north Asian FTAs Robb has concluded helps us with New Delhi.
Here we need a note of caution. Each one of these relationships — the US, China and India — is intensely complex, influenced by many factors beyond Australia’s reach and there are many ways these ambitious plans could fall short, if not fall apart.
Take each in turn.
Obama’s speech was deliberately designed to hurt Abbott. This may not have been its primary purpose, but it certainly was a significant effect. Historians of the relationship cannot cite a single similar example of a visiting president going out of his way to wound an Australian prime minister.
The speech was bizarre in many ways and deserves proper analysis as a pointer to the divisions and dysfunction within the Obama administration, features which will only get worse as power, and a sense of responsibility, ebb away from Obama in the less than two years he still has in office.
There was also an element of cowardice in the speech. Obama would never have given that speech at home before the congressional mid-term elections. There would have been some courage in such a speech delivered, say, in West Virginia, or Ohio, a week before the mid-terms.
What was Obama’s purpose? Can one more celebrity orgasm really be more important to the President than maintaining his relationship with his closest ally in Asia? Was Obama preparing for his post-presidential life, as a new and improved Al Gore? […]
Finally, other senior Americans put it to me that many high-level figures in the administration, in so far as they think about Asia at all, think only of China. They fail to understand that a successful China policy has to be embedded in a successful Asia policy. This contributes to their taking close allies for granted.
Virtually all senior Asia hands in Washington outside the administration agree that Obama has never really paid attention to managing alliances.
This was evident in the fact that the Obama team decided to do the speech at the last minute, insisted it be to a university audience, never gave their Australian hosts any hint of what the President was planning to say, and refused to offer the Australians either a text or a summary of the speech before it was delivered. All of that is truly a bizarre way to treat an ally.
Nonetheless, Obama’s selfindulgence will not cause the Abbott government to back away from co-operation with the US. The alliance is much bigger than Obama and Australia participates in the alliance because it is in our interests and reflects our values.
The vacuum created by Obama in Asia is partly filled by Xi, although other formidable Asian leaders such as Abe and Modi also occupy important strategic space.
Xi, like most Chinese leaders, is a super hard head with little sentimentality. He is the most powerful leader in modern China since at least Deng Xiaoping. He offered an ambition to make China more democratic in his beautifully crafted speech to parliament, but in truth he has suppressed what little liberal space formerly existed in China.
Nonetheless, Xi is genuinely an economic reformer, which is one reason he undertook the FTA with Australia. Xi’s climate deal with Obama is another masterstroke. It commits him to nothing of substance, nothing he was not doing anyway, but, with Obama’s benediction, will help insulate Beijing from the type of criticism it suffered after Copenhagen.
Xi spent a lot of time in Australia and devoted a lot of attention to us. This speaks well of him, and of Abbott. But again, we have to be a bit careful of assessing Chinese policy, even Chinese policy towards us, in a narrow Australian framework.
This past few months, Xi has been on a charm offensive with everyone. He even kissed and made up with Abe. As well as his climate faux agreement with Obama, Xi agreed to various confidence-building and military consultation measures with the Americans, which Washington has wanted for years.
Nor is it quite true to say that Australia is the first advanced economy with which Beijing has done an FTA. Xi finalised an FTA with South Korea just before the one with Australia.
All of this is in stark contrast to the aggressiveness Beijing has displayed over the past few years in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Intelligence agencies in the US and Australia are flat out trying to work out whether this friendliness is the new paradigm for China, or, as one senior American put it to me, “a judo move”, that is, moving back for a second in order to trip the opponent up.
China’s behaviour in the disputed maritime territories over the next few months will be critical in determining the answer to this question.
Abbott convened a trilateral leaders’ dialogue with Obama and Abe. The official communique was full of concern over Russia, Islamic State etc. It didn’t mention the main actual topic of conversation — China, or another topic of conversation, Canberra’s ambition to buy Japanese submarines and install US weapon systems on them.
And finally Modi’s India. Modi offers India its best hope in decades for breaking free from poverty and achieving sustained, socially transformative economic growth. But just as analysts are pondering Xi’s true intentions so they are asking one central question about Modi — can he tame the Indian bureaucracy and produce results? This astonishing two weeks of summits has given Australia a great deal of benefit, but left huge and intriguing questions for the future.
3) Germany Desperate For More Coal Power To Keep Lights On
The Sunday Times, 23 November 2014
Lured by subsidies, the power companies went green. But to keep the lights on they have to burn coal.
Sixty miles northeast of Düsseldorf, outside the town of Hamm in northwest Germany, workers are giving a final tune-up to a glittering new power station.
Germany is the biggest proponent of the green electricity revolution, but this plant won’t be powered by the sun, wind or woodchips — it will burn dirty old coal.
Built by German energy giant RWE at a cost of €2bn (£1.6bn), the plant is no aberration. This year the company, which owns Npower in Britain, and its rivals have poured billions of euros into a fleet of new coal-fired plants, the most polluting form of power generation. When finished they will be capable of supplying more than 8m households.
The boom runs entirely counter to the European Union’s mission, led by Germany and Britain, to replace the old fossil fuel-based energy system with a cleaner alternative. Indeed, the Germans source a quarter of their power from solar, wind and other renewables. Yet last year, carbon dioxide emissions actually rose 1.2%, partly due to the resurgence of coal.
This is just one of the surprising and unintended consequences of Europe’s troubled effort to lead the world into the low-carbon era. And the fallout is set to become even more extreme.
Governments from Berlin to Madrid — and London — are dramatically scaling back the huge subsidy programmes introduced over the past decade to underwrite the revolution.
All are struggling to come to grips with an industry transformed by America’s shale gas boom.
In July, Germany — Europe’s biggest power market — passed a new renewable energy act that slashed taxpayer support by a quarter for solar and wind energy.
The reduction is partly a reaction to plummeting costs. Ben Warren, head of environmental finance at the consultants EY, said: “Policymakers underestimated how quickly costs would fall. Five years ago it cost €6m to install a megawatt of solar. That same megawatt today could cost as little as €700,000.”
That drop is what led the Department of Energy and Climate Change to slash subsidies for solar generators in Britain two years ago. A less dramatic drop in costs has meant cuts to aid for wind farms, both onshore and at sea.
In Germany, however, the trend has been much more dramatic. Since 2004 the share of energy generated from renewable sources has jumped sixfold to 27% — nearly double the ratio in Britain.
The boom was much bigger than Berlin bargained for, which means the country is now saddled with a huge supply surplus.
One might reasonably expect a big drop in household bills to follow. That hasn’t happened. Over the decade when renewables exploded onto the scene, Germany’s annual household bills increased by nearly two-thirds to €1,020 (£815).
Indeed, even though the wholesale power price has fallen by nearly 40% in the past five years, German consumer rates have risen steadily. Why? Because more than half the bill is now made up of taxes and ever-rising green charges.
Full story (subscription required)
4) Renewable Energy ‘Simply Won’t Work’, Top Google Engineers Conclude
The Register, 21 November 2014
Lewis Page
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.
RE<C was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum the two men write:
At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
One should note that RE<C didn’t restrict itself to conventional renewable ideas like solar PV, windfarms, tidal, hydro etc. It also looked extensively into more radical notions such as solar-thermal, geothermal, “self-assembling” wind towers and so on and so forth. There’s no get-out clause for renewables believers here.
