Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
AL Jaber: I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.
By Robert Bradley Jr. — December 16, 2023
“The final COP28 text ‘calls on’ governments ‘to transition away from fossil fuels’… This is the weakest possible formulation according to UNFCCC’s own style guide (see image below). The list below is in order of strength (from strongest ‘instruct’ to weakest ‘calls’). We should not celebrate the COP28 final text as a ‘landmark deal’ ….”
– Andreas Rasche, Copenhagen Business School (below)
The “breakthrough” hyperbole of the mainstream media (in search of momentum with an issue that the public has rightfully demoted) is not going over very well with the climate religionists on the ground.
Al Gore Hype
Al Gore himself, unable to wave the white flag, spins failure into hope:
The decision at COP28 to finally recognize that the climate crisis is, at its heart, a fossil fuel crisis is an important milestone. But it is also the bare minimum we need and is long overdue. The influence of petrostates is still evident in the half measures and loopholes included in the final agreement…. We must ask ourselves how much longer will the world have wait before all nations summon the political will to overcome these narrow special interests and act on behalf of the future of humanity.”
Progress but …. This is what Gore has been saying for decades. No mid-course correction with this wooden fellow.
Realists on the Ground
But what do the realistic climate crusaders think? Andreas Rasche of the Copenhagen Business School wrote:
The final COP28 text “calls on” governments “to transition away from fossil fuels”… This is the weakest possible formulation according to UNFCCC’s own style guide (see image below). The list below is in order of strength (from strongest “instruct” to weakest “calls”).
We should not celebrate the COP28 final text as a “landmark deal” — It is the absolute minimum and not a bold historic achievement. With this language it is easier for governments to ignore the formulation around “transitioning away from fossil fuels” (as some states have ignored their reporting on nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement in the past).
In the end, it will matter how governments interpret (and *want to* interpret) this passage of the COP28 agreement. Words matter – but actions speak louder…
So the market share of fossil fuels will be little changed and the world has a lot more industrial wind, solar planks, and batteries… And rent-seeking by corporate cronies and politicians jetting around the world. And attacks on civil liberties as the CO2 police get desperate. Climate’s road to serfdom … Is it worth it?
Last Word: Al Jaber
The major takeaway from COP28 besides more-of-the-same failure was said by Al Jaber:
I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.
The usual wailing and wild statements we’ve come to expect in the wake of the annual COP failure.
‘Weak tea’: Climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer
Washington (AFP) – A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism.
Issued on: 14/12/2023 – 02:41
…
Michael Mann … “The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP. “It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from donuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes. The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating.”
Mann called for a substantial reform of the COP rules, for example permitting super-majorities to approve decisions over the objections of holdout petro states like Saudi Arabia, and barring oil executives such as COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber from presiding over future summits.
…
‘Death knell for 1.5C’
“No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care,” said Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.
…
‘Many will die’
Friederike Otto, a climatologist and leader in the field of assessing the role of climate change on specific extreme weather events, was equally damning. … “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”
Mann’s demand for a transition to a supermajority rather than unanimous vote is intriguing. I mean, how does Mann plan to enforce agreements if he has his supermajority, but one or two key players like India or China say no? Send in the US army?
These climate scientists just aren’t living in the real world.
Following the spectacle and theatre of COP 28, I thought it might be a good idea to remind ourselves of the rationale behind the targets upon which its deliberations were founded. After all, we all thought we knew that a two degree Celsius increase in temperature would spell disaster.
Following the spectacle and theatre of COP 28, I thought it might be a good idea to remind ourselves of the rationale behind the targets upon which its deliberations were founded. After all, we all thought we knew that a two degree Celsius increase in temperature would spell disaster. Now we all presume to know that one and a half degrees will do the trick. But what exactly is the strength of the science behind the determination of such thresholds?
The COP 28 delegates will tell you that they don’t care anymore, because this is a matter of settled science, and that is all you need to know. Short shrift would be given to any suggestion that there is still debate to be had concerning the scientific basis. As for any suggestion that the specification of the targets was actually a political manoeuvre … well, that is to laugh. Except it’s true, and I’m not even joking.
That values ascribed to safety targets owe more to politics than science should not strike you as controversial, but I am prepared to bet that it will, at least where climate change safety targets are concerned. This is because, whereas safety professionals are quite aware of the arbitrariness that often accompanies the quantification of targets, climate policy-makers wouldn’t dream of conceding an inch on the mantra of ‘following the science’. For them, two degrees increase doesn’t just provide a simply understood framework within which to work, it represents a consensus arrived at by thousands of scientists objectively beavering away in the way that scientists always do. It’s as if the 40 mph speed limit that suddenly appeared on your commute to work was the result of endless studies of accident statistics, combined with consideration of the local road conditions as related to accident causation, rather than an arbitrary gesture in response to a general road safety campaign (which is actually the much more likely scenario). I’m sure a set of consultants would have been employed to validate the choice of speed limit, but rest assured that their recommendations were provided only to help push through the ‘correct’ policy. Speaking as a former traffic control systems safety analyst, I have to hope that you can just take my word that this is how these things generally go down.
But climate science is different, I hear you say. Well, let us look at the evidence for that. What exactly is the history behind the setting of the current climate change speed limit?
It’s politics, stupid
It is generally accepted that the first person to mention a two degree Celsius limit was Nobel economist William Nordhaus, back in the 1970s. As he put it:
“As a first approximation, it seems reasonable to argue that the climatic effects of carbon dioxide should be kept within the normal range of long-term climatic variation. According to most sources the range of variation between distinct climatic regimes is in the order of ±5°C, and at the present time the global climate is at the high end of this range. If there were global temperatures more than 2° or 3° above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.”
The first thing to note here is the range of uncertainty, i.e. ‘2° or 3°’. The second is how weak the argument is for this ‘first approximation’. It doesn’t involve a detailed scientific assessment of the impacts of warming, it merely makes the ‘reasonable’ assumption that we might not wish to invite an unfamiliar scenario. As such, it is essentially precautionary in its nature. Furthermore, no data or citations were offered at the time by Nordhaus to back up his claims regarding the Earth’s temperature record.
Be that as it may, there were many who were later willing to back Nordhaus’s intuitions. In particular, the WMO/ICSU/UNEP Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases produced a report in 1990 that re-iterated the significance of a 2° limit (the lower of the two figures proposed by Nordhaus), this time by arguing for the likelihood of non-linear, catastrophic impacts beyond that threshold. The baton was also picked up by the German Advisory Council for Global Change (WBGU) in the 1990s. It was the WBGU, under chairman Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, that convinced Angela Merkel of the 2°C target, thereby starting a political process that ultimately led to the adoption of the 2°C target by organisations such as the G8, the Major Economies Forum, and the Conference of the Parties held in 2010 in Copenhagen. It was also largely through the exhortations of Schellnhuber (a member of the Club of Rome advocating for a ‘move towards more equitable economic, financial, and socio-political models’) that the target was later to be reduced to 1.5°C. Again, such arguments were ostensibly motivated by the desire to avoid tipping points that could not be proven but were deemed sufficiently plausible to invoke the precautionary principle.
I would not wish to give the idea that there was no science behind the proposal of the 2°C target, or indeed its subsequent reduction to 1.5°C. However, it would be naïve to suggest that the values chosen arose from any detailed calculations corroborated by multiple groups of scientists working independently. The history of the limit owes a lot more to the scientific hand-waving of small but influential bodies who have furnished their political overlords with suitably rounded numbers that can function as a focal point in the climate policy arena. In that respect, the analogy with traffic speed limits is most apt. The science might suggest a speed limit of 37 mph, and even that different limits apply for differently experienced drivers. It is fortunate, however, that speed limits are not set by scientists but set by politicians who understand that focal points are important for success, and simplicity is important for focal points. Richard Betts of the Met Office puts it this way:
“The level of danger at any particular speed depends on many factors… It would be too complicated and unworkable to set individual speed limits for individual circumstances taking into account all these factors, so clear and simple general speed limits are set using judgement and experience to try to get an overall balance between advantages and disadvantages of higher speeds for the community of road users as a whole.”
So 40 mph it is for everyone. Similarly, 1.5°C is chosen not so much for its scientific accuracy but for its political expediency. After all, it is supposed to equate to an acceptable level of risk, and questions of acceptability are political rather than scientific.
Build it and they will come
And that would be the end of my story were it not for one more important detail. If 1.5°C is just a number plucked out of the air because it sets a good target, then why is it that so many scientific studies have subsequently appeared to verify its critical importance? How come that a figure that arose from years of intuitions, guesses and vaguely applied scientific insights has proven to be bang on the money, according to the current crop of peer-reviewed articles published in prestigious journals.
To understand this apparent coincidence, one has to appreciate just how a politically established focal point serves to guide the direction taken by scientific study. Furthermore, one has to drop the naïve view, often expressed, that the scientific method and the competitive nature of the scientific enterprise ensure that any suspect propositions will be challenged and ultimately overturned. The main problem with this naïve view is that it ignores the social feedback that occurs once a particular view has gained dominance. In an ideal world, such dominance should not interfere with the objectivity of decisions taken, but in the real world there are positive feedbacks that tend to reinforce popularity at the expense of veracity. Put another way, once an authoritative position has been established, credence can no longer be purely evidence-driven. One example of this phenomenon is the Matthew Effect as it applies to the establishment of a dominance of citations for particular researchers. Unfortunately, however, because science is a social undertaking, such feedbacks are a lot more pervasive than citation bias alone might suggest, since they also bear upon the popularity of research undertaken, methods adopted, the conclusions to be drawn and the chances of gaining publication. None of the above are free decisions to be undertaken, since they will all be marshalled by a guiding social hand that reinforces with agency that has no need of conspiracy.
Occasionally, though rarely, the reality of social feedback within the scientific domain will be highlighted by those who operate within it. The message is rarely welcomed, however, since it undermines the whole idea that scientific authority can always be trusted to inform political decision-making. The suggestion that science has a propensity to provide politically correct answers does not go down well with those who have been brought up to believe in an unchallengeable scientific integrity. And so the social sanctions for those who speak out can be severe, as exemplified by the recent experience of climate scientist Patrick T. Brown when he detailed how these mechanisms operate within climate science. To him there is no surprise that research vindicating the 1.5°C target hugely dominates within the prestigious journals, any more than I wasn’t surprised to see safety analyses that conveniently validated traffic speed limits that had been the result of politically taken decisions.
But does any of it matter?
One of the most interesting features of limits and targets is the alacrity with which they are set and the facility with which they are ignored. There are laws of physics that should be borne in mind when determining whether a proposed action or current situation can be deemed sufficiently safe. But the law that states ‘thou shalt not exceed 1.5°C warming’ is of quite a different stripe. It was readily conceived with the minimum of required science, and has been subsequently ‘validated’ with more science than can be decently applied. Since COP 15, such limits have been treated with a dread reverence that looks increasingly melodramatic when one considers how much reality and rhetoric have diverged. It is no wonder, therefore, that each successive COP declaration has been heralded with unprecedented hope, only to be reviewed with unprecedented despair. I guess there is only so much one can achieve by setting limits when everyone knows that they are just symbolic focal points.
The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.
The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.
A new comprehensive analysis (Tol, 2023) weighs the cost-benefit of meeting Paris Accord emission policy targets to keep global warming in check, or under 2°C.
The analysis reveals that even in the best case scenarios (that assume emission reduction policies fully meet their avoided-warming targets), as well as in the worst case scenarios (that assume “constant vulnerability” to global-warming-induced climate disasters and widespread economic austerity), the tens of trillions of USD costs associated with moving away from fossil fuel consumption to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 (4.8% of GDP) still outweigh the net benefit losses (3.0% of GDP) in 2100.
“The central estimate of the costs of climate policy, unrealistically assuming least-cost implementation, is 3.8–5.6% of GDP in 2100. The central estimate of the benefits of climate policy, unrealistically assuming high no-policy emissions and constant vulnerability, is 2.8–3.2% of GDP.”
There is a nearly 10 times worse cost versus benefit if we only consider the net impact of best- and worst-case-scenario emissions reduction policies through 2050, which is the year it is assumed the world economy will have reached net-zero targets if all goes according to plan.
“In 2050, the year of net-zero, the best estimate of the benefits of the 1.5∘C target are about 0.5% of GDP while the costs are almost 5%.”
Of course, if the more realistic outcomes with regard to achieving emissions reduction targets eventuate, and if the global warming on tap for failing to achieve these targets is not as exaggeratedly hot as models assume (e.g., 5°C warming by 2100), the net costs of climate “action” exceed the benefits of avoided warming two-, three- and even four-fold.
Simply put, the “Paris targets do not pass the cost-benefit test.”
“Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”
United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to “solve” climate change. Then he says, “There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem.”
Yes, they are projecting more than 100 Trillion US$.
Kerry has little understanding of money or how it’s created. He’s a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.
Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.
Lomberg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. “As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything else, expands. So we’re going to maybe see three feet of sea level rise. Then they say, ‘So everybody who lives within three feet of sea level, they’ll have to move!’ Well, no. If you actually look at what people do, they built dikes and so they don’t have to move.”
Rotterdam Adaptation Policy–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.
People in Holland did that years ago. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level. In some areas, it’s 22 feet below. Yet the country thrives. That’s the way to deal with climate change: adjust to it.
“Fewer people are going to get flooded every year, despite the fact that you have much higher sea level rise. The total cost for Holland over the last half-century is about $10 billion,” says Lomberg. “Not nothing, but very little for an advanced economy over 50 years.”
For saying things like that, Lomberg is labeled “the devil.”
“The problem here is unmitigated scaremongering,” he replies. “A new survey shows that 60 percent of all people in rich countries now believe it’s likely or very likely that unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of mankind. This is what you get when you have constant fearmongering in the media.”
Some people now say they will not have children because they’re convinced that climate change will destroy the world. Lomborg points out how counterproductive that would be: “We need your kids to make sure the future is better.”
He acknowledges that climate warming will kill people.
“As temperatures go up, we’re likely to see more people die from heat. That’s absolutely true. You hear this all the time. But what is underreported is the fact that nine times as many people die from cold…. As temperatures go up, you’re going to see fewer people die from cold. Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”
A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Source: The Lancet
That’s rarely reported in the news.
When the media doesn’t fret over deaths from heat, they grab at other possible threats.
CNN claims, “Climate Change is Fueling Extremism.”
The BBC says, “A Shifting Climate is Catalysing Infectious Disease.“
U.S. News and World Report says, “Climate Change will Harm Children’s Mental Health.”
Lomborg replies, “It’s very, very easy to make this argument that everything is caused by climate change if you don’t have the full picture.”
He points out that we rarely hear about positive effects of climate change, like global greening.
Spatial pattern of trends in Gross Primary Production (1982- 2015). Source: Sun et al. 2018.
“That’s good! We get more green stuff on the planet. My argument is not that climate change is great or overall positive. It’s simply that, just like every other thing, it has pluses and minuses…. Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”
Synopsis of Lomborg’s Policy Recommendation (excerpted transcription)
If you’re a politician and you look at ten different problems, you’re natural inclination is to say, “Let’s give 1/10 to each one of them.” And economists would tend to say, “No, let’s give all of the money to the most efficient problem first and then to the second most efficient problem, and so on. I’m simply suggesting there’s a way that we could do much better with much less.
Of course if you feel very strongly about your particular area, when I come and say, “Actually, this is not a very efficient use of resources.” I get why people get upset. But for our collective good, for all the stuff that we do on the planet, we actually need to consider carefully where do we spend money well, compared to where do we just spend money and feel virtuous about ourselves.
If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate, not only are we not fixing climate, but we’re also wasting an enormous amount of money that could have been spent on all these other things.
I’m simply trying to make that simple point, and I think most people kind of get that. Remember, electricity is about a fifth of our total energy consumption. So, all everybody’s talking about is all the electricity, which is the easiest thing to switch over. But we don’t know anything about how we’re going to, know very, very little about how we’re going to deal with the other 4/5. This is energy that we use on things that are very, very hard to replace. So it’s a fertilizer that keeps 4 billion people alive. Making the fertilizer. It’s steel, cement, it’s industrial processes. Most of heating we use comes from fossil fuels, most transportation, that’s fossil fuels.
Know that if the U.S. went entirely net zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century, consider how incredibly extreme this would be. First of all, you would not be able to feed everyone in the U.S. The whole economy would break down. You wouldn’t know how to get transportation. A lot of people would freeze. Some people would fry. There would be lots and lots of problems. But even if you did this and managed to do it, the net impact, if you run it through the U.N. climate model, is that youwould reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit. We would almost not be able to measure it by the end of the century. It would have virtually no impact.
Look, again, we’re rich and so a lot of people feel like you can spend money on many different things. And that’s true. I’m making the argument that for fairly little money, we could do amazing good. If we spent $35 billion, not a trillion dollars, just $35 billion, which is not nothing. I don’t think, neither you or I have that amount of money. But, you know, in the big scheme of things, this is a rounding error. $35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world, each and every year and make the poor world $1.1 trillion richer.
I think we have a moral responsibility to remember, that there are lots and lots of people, so mostly about 6 billion people out there, who don’t have this luxury of being able to think 100 years ahead and think about a little bit of a fraction of a degree, who wants to make sure that their kids are safe. And so, the next money we spend should probably be on these very simple and cheap policies.
It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud?
It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.
From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.”The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:
The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.
Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:
The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.
The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).
Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.
El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:
And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!
The 28th Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 13, 2023. According to various reports, more than 100,000 people attended the conference and its associated events.
The 28th Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 13, 2023. According to various reports, more than 100,000 people attended the conference and its associated events.
Most of the outcomes of the conference are listed in the conference decision on the “Outcome of the first global stocktake”. The decision document is 21 pages of highly bureaucratic language mostly recalling past COP decisions and exhorting the Parties to increased efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
In the following summary of the conferences results, I will summarize them with reference to some of the key themes of the conference as set out by the Conference Chair.
“Stimulating a course correction for climate action”
Goal: Using the recently completed global “stock take” on the performance of countries to reduce emissions fast enough to meet the 1.5 degrees C. goal, the conference sought to bring political pressure to bear on countries urgently to adopt more stringent emission-reduction policies both pre-2030 and pre-2035.
These plans are called the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The UN “stocktake” was intended to be an assessment, based on the NDCs, and the measurement of GHG emissions reductions achieved to date, of how well the Parties were doing in seeking to reduce emissions so as to meet the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in average global temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees C. by 2100.
The stocktake “recognized” that “limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C. with no or limited overshoot requires peaking in global greenhouse gas emissions at the latest before 2025 and rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2035 relative to the 2019 level and to reach net zero CO2 emissions by 2050”.
The NDC analysis found that GHG emission levels in 2030 are “likely to be 5.3 per cent lower than in 2019 if all NDCs, including all conditional elements, are fully implemented and that enhanced financial resources, technology transfer and technical cooperation, and capacity-building support are as needed to support this.”
The decision document “called on the Parties” voluntarily to make national efforts to do eight things:
Triple renewable energy capacity globally and double the annual average rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030;
Accelerate efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power;
Accelerate efforts globally towards net zero emission energy systems, utilizing zero- and low-carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century;
Transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050;
Accelerate zero- and low-emission technologies, including inter alia renewable, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, and low-carbon hydrogen production;
Accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon-dioxide emissions globally, including in articular methane emissions by 2030;
Accelerate the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero-emission and low-emission vehicles; and
Phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
While this statement of goals is not binding, much of the negotiation of the decision document focused on it, especially on the reference to “transitioning away from fossil fuels”. The UN and the EU tried unsuccessfully to get agreement on “phasing out” or “phasing down” fossil fuel use and production, but were unable to get agreement on those words.
“Delivering on promises made to the developing world”
Goal: The conference sought to ‘operationalize” the Loss and Damages Fund that was approved in principle at COP27, elicit voluntary pledges, and seek longer-term financial pledges. It also sought of agreement on the level of the post-2025 climate aid commitment (hoping for at least USD 1.4 trillion per year).
The decision document stated that the adaptation finance needs of the developing countries are estimated at USD 215-387 billion annually up until 2030, and that about USD 4.3 trillion per year needs to be invested in clean energy up until 2030, increasing thereafter to USD 5 trillion per year up until 2050, to be able to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The conference sought support for more funds for climate adaptation and for “operationalizing” the Loss and Damages fund (the fund intended to tax developed countries to pay for the adverse effects of severe weather events in developing countries). To date, there is no agreement on which countries should pay and how much they should pay or on which countries will qualify to receive payments and how much they will qualify to receive. It remains to seen which “extreme weather events” are considered to be caused by human-related GHG emissions and which are not.
The decision document “noted with deep regret” that the goal of having Annex II countries (i.e. mainly the OECD developed countries) provide at least $100 billion in climate aid per year in the pre-2025 period was not met in 2021. It welcomed pledges made by 31 contributors (including Canada) for the “replenishment” of the Green Climate Fund, resulting in a nominal pledge of USD 12.8 billion to date (i.e. a long way from USD 1.4 trillion).
The document also welcomed the pledges made to provide USD 188 million for the Adaptation Fund (i.e. far below the billions per year sought) and pledges for USD 792 million for Loss and Damages. These were voluntary commitments, so there was no agreement to make them obligatory.
“Scaling Up Accountability”
Goal: The conference sought to “add new mechanisms for regular follow up of NDC implementation through the existing UNFCCC institutions. The conference also sought member states’ agreement to have additional summit meetings (to keep up the political pressures at the highest levels); and the “mobilization” of non-state actors” like ENGOs, Indigenous groups and municipalities. Finally, it sought agreement to further international “coordination of regulation”.
The decision document included no reference to the increased institutional and governance structures discussed and agreed to at the conference.
The United Nations produces reports on the Global Climate Action Portal listing all the announcements made at COP 28. There were 175 separate announcements, the titles and brief descriptions of which require 45 pages of dense text. Many new organizations and initiatives were announced covering a wide range of topics.
Next Meetings
COP 29 will take place in Azerbaijan from November 11 to 22, 2024 and Brazil will host COP 30 from November 10 to 21 2025.
This story has been well coordinated to hit the world’s media at the end of COP28:
People moved to El Bosque in the 1980s to fish. Setting out into the Gulf of Mexico in threes and fours, fishermen returned with buckets of tarpon and long, streaked snook. There was more than enough to feed them, and build a community – three schools, a small church and a basketball court on the sand.
Flooding driven by some of the world’s fastest sea-level rise and by increasingly brutal winter storms has all but destroyed El Bosque, leaving piles of concrete and twisted metal rods where houses used to line the sand. Forced to flee the homes they built, locals are waiting for government aid and living in rentals they can scarcely afford.
The Daily Mail commenters have almost to a man worked out what the naive reporter cut & pasted. El Bosque, which was only inhabited in the 1980s, is built on a sand dune.
It is hardly surprising that it is quickly eroding away:
What if some phenomenally large energy/materials breakthroughs were right here in front of us, vastly more accessible than experimental aspirations, but held back by an image problem?
What if some phenomenally large energy/materials breakthroughs were right here in front of us, vastly more accessible than experimental aspirations, but held back by an image problem?
To help ponder that question, it is necessary to share with you one of the best (meaning funniest), most explosive miscalculations in modern science; the reason for bringing it up is that it’s simply too good not to. But before that, some context.
It seems there are a number of energy paths ahead of us. One, there will be some sort of breakthrough in energy technology that ushers in a whole new way of powering things. But we can’t bank on that, for the same reason people can’t bank on lottery tickets for retirement. We don’t know if the breakthrough will actually happen, and even if one does, we don’t know what it would take to build it out – materials-wise, cost-wise, planning-wise, etc. (Please don’t send me a picture of what some team has working in the lab. Been far too dazzled by those things for decades now, call me when it’s on the market.)
We might get more comfortable societally with nuclear energy; the world seems hellbent on ‘carbon free energy’ and the only way that’s going to happen in a way that meets the needs of 8 billion people is nuclear power. But I get that some people get pretty rattled by nuclear energy, figuratively speaking, which I understand; nuclear fallout is probably not what you want to wake up and see dusting the patio furniture.
Far be it from me to add any negativity to the discussion however; I think nuclear is key to a low-emission future. Which brings me to the story mentioned at the outset.
By the 1950s, researchers had found that nuclear bombs were proficient at leveling cities, but there was much that was not known about them. To help answer questions, the US government launched the ominously goofily named Operation Plumbbob, a series of nuclear tests.
In 1956, a researcher named Dr. Robert Brownlee of the prestigious (before the experiment) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was asked to examine whether nuclear explosions could be tested underground, and what would happen to the subterranean earth in such an event. He apparently said sure, why not, or some such.
To find out just what would happen, the researchers dutifully detonated a nuclear bomb named Pascal A 500 feet underground (the military had an odd habit of naming nuclear bombs; why they would want to humanize these things in any way whatsoever I have no clue). In the spirit of modern YouTubers, that attempt was a 1950s equivalent of hillbillies launching a claptrap Jeep across a creek and coming up 50 percent short. In other words, the Los Alamos scientists severely miscalculated. But the miscalculation was not due to insufficient energy, quite the opposite; the force of the blast was some 50,000 times higher than expected. As Dr. Brownlee, apparently a droll master of understatement, put it, “We figured you could keep everything in but for a few per cent by going underground. But Mother Nature can outwit you in a great variety of ways.” Dr. Brownlee described the resulting monstrous jet of fire as “the world’s finest Roman candle.”
They weren’t done there, however. With curious minds still wanting to know, the team stuffed Pascal B down a similar hole to detonate it similarly, but with a “fix” – the team welded a four-inch-thick metal and concrete cap weighing 900 kilograms/2,000 pounds, over the bomb to contain the explosion.
You just know this is gonna be good, right?
Dr. Brownlee suspected the weld wouldn’t hold and that the lid would be blown off, so to document the shenanigans, the team installed a high-speed camera nearby that would capture the action at a thousand frames per second. If the main force of the explosion did go upwards instead of downwards as hoped, all would be documented.
Mother Nature outwitted them again though, in a way. The cement/steel lid did blow off, and the camera did catch it doing so, but only for a fraction of an instant, a single millisecond, in a single frame. In other words, the massive slab was going like a rocket. Actually, far, far faster than a rocket – the scientists calculated the cement slab’s speed at 66 kilometers per second, or 150,000 miles per hour – six times the velocity required to escape earth’s orbit. “I have no idea what happened to that cap,” said Dr. Brownlee. There is a chance that the speed was such that it blasted into space and is sailing off to parts unknown as we speak (recent calculations suggest the lid simply vaporized, which is a pretty neat trick in its own right).
It is unfortunate for us humans with dark senses of humour that Dr. Brownlee’s team was never commissioned to design a ride at Disneyland.
Now, it stands to reason that significant technological developments won’t always have such colourful episodes, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean they will go smoothly. We may grumble about our supply chains and the emissions thereof and the dominant reliance on hydrocarbons to make it all work, but look at the challenges of trying to ram any new energy system through rapidly. The existing system has been cobbled together over more than a century; people, cities, civilizations and our modern way of life have been wrapped around it. They exist because of it. Changing the fundamental system is not going to happen quickly, no matter what comes along as a new energy source.
If nuclear took off (no pun intended), it would be massively disruptive in its own way, as mining giant Robert Friedland recently pointed out in an interview (“If you have a nuclear reactor you can make hydrogen…Obviously if we were serious about this we’d immediately build two thousand or four thousand or five thousand one-thousand megawatt nuclear reactors. Now, how much metal do we need to weld those containment vessels? The United States has lost the capability to even build a nuclear plant… and so yeah we could build two, five thousand reactors, out of what? How much niobium in that containment vessel, how much vanadium in that specialty steel, how do you weld it, how much steel, concrete, rebar, how much raw materials do you need, how you going to organize it, how you going to mine it… how many nuclear engineers do you have to train to build that shit and to regulate it… do you think that’s actually going to happen?… You say definitely I say maybe… talk is cheap.”
People get excited about nuclear fusion and lithium metal batteries and heaven knows what dreams are going on in green brains, but any of them are going to be massively disruptive and a challenge to integrate, because it is hard to build any infrastructure anywhere, and our countless systems work because of that existing infrastructure. An energy transition is not like a transition from land lines to cell phones; it is more like moving every highway in the world a hundred meters to the east. Some fraction of that task would be easy, but much would be challenging beyond belief.
The world will be much, much better served if we leverage what we have and what we know to the full extent, without demonization, without vilification, in the full, purely scientific sense of curiosity.
Here then is a look at something we all should be excited about, particularly in Canada. The oil sands have been extensively vilified, and children around the world have been taught to loathe this inanimate natural oil deposit (a task made easier by giving a more repulsive name, tar sands – hey, in modern energy warfare, no strategy is too small).
It turns out that the bitumen – the heavy, thick oil component in the oil sands – has many potential uses beyond just burning it. Through decades of producing, processing, and refining it, we know a great deal about the goo. Combining the knowledge of bitumen itself with a view to other uses shows that there is staggering potential in the use of bitumen beyond combustion.
Logically enough then, there is a program called Bitumen Beyond Combustion (BBC), details of which can be found at the Alberta Innovates website. A fascinating white paper located there describes the program in detail. The concept is to divert produced bitumen from its use as a fuel towards using it to generate industrial products. Bitumen can generate a number of high value products including asphalt binder, carbon fibre, and numerous others.
Carbon fibre is my personal favourite, having been a Formula 1 fan for years. In a modern F1 car, as many components as possible are made from carbon fibre, including the basic chassis known as a monocoque, a weird name for what is sort of a tight bathtub that forms a shell around the driver and attaches to the engine. F1 designers call this carbon fibre structure “virtually indestructible”; doubters can check this picture of the wreckage of F1 driver Roman Grosjean’s car; the driver hit a track wall at close to 120 mph, and the carbon fibre tub and halo remained intact. The material is twice as strong as steel and five times lighter. An F1 car’s tub is usually made from 12 layers of carbon fibre mats. The whole thing weighs 35 kilograms, as much as a small goat but offering vastly better protection.
What makes these car parts interesting to all of you guys out there is that these fancy bath tubs cost an estimated US$700,000. It’s great stuff, but hideously expensive, which, for bitumen producers, spells opportunity. The BBC document shows a chart of value added to bitumen; as a combustible fuel the product is worth about $0.30-0.50/kilogram. As carbon fibre, the bitumen is worth $10-20/kilogram, and utilizes only about 20 percent of the barrel.
Those are staggering values to extract from a barrel of bitumen. As a whole, the BBC white paper estimates the following benefits. If one million barrels per day of bitumen is sold to refineries at $50/barrel after diluent removal, the revenue is $18 billion per year. If the same volume was used to create BBC products, the potential revenue is calculated at $42 billion. This number includes the value of BBC products ($28 billion) plus the value of the light ends remaining from the bitumen ($14 billion).
Of interest to the feds, and everyone with their Net Zero 20xx scorecard out, there are enormous emissions savings to be had here as well. For every million barrels of bitumen used for BBC, 480,000 barrels would be diverted to non-combustion BBC products. If used as a fuel that volume would generate 70 million tonnes of emissions per year. Furthermore, a study cited in the white paper estimates that carbon fibre derived from BBC would have a 52 percent lower life cycle GHG emissions intensity than conventionally produced carbon fibre.
Alberta Innovates estimates that total annual revenue from BBC could exceed $100 billion, yes that’s per year, by 2050.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Such great stuff! Imagine if this industry took off here in Alberta, and large quantities of oil sands output went into BBC manufacturing. This program should be a top priority if you ask me.
Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to be. Certain groups like Alberta Innovates are working very hard on it and committing material sums. But the numbers devoted to BBC seem, relative to government largesse on virtually anything remotely considered ‘renewable’, kind of pathetic. Alberta Innovates notes some $20 million devoted to the program to date (feel free to correct if wrong, I may be missing some sums but not a lot). The federal government seems keen on the idea, having its own web page dedicated to bitumen beyond combustion, and it links to a bona fide research centre in Devon, Alberta, but that research centre’s website shows that most of the researchers are working on something else. All valid projects, it appears, and well worthwhile, but a focus on BBC there does not seem to be.
And that is ridiculous, in the context of the tens of billions being thrown around like confetti in the ‘energy transition’. The Alberta Innovates white paper outlines that it will take $300 million in total government investment over the next 10 years to recognize the full potential of BBC. Recall the prize: global-scale reductions in GHG emissions from utilizing bitumen rather than combustion, potential for $100 billion/year BBC revenues, backed by a 165-billion-barrel bitumen resource.
$300 million over 10 years. $30 million per year. The federal government recently contributed $150 million to the daffy plan to generate hydrogen in Newfoundland and ship it to Germany, and that amount is surely a tiny, tiny fraction of federal largesse that will be sent to the Rock for this plan that no one anywhere thinks makes sense. A CBC article noted how one of the participating companies is investing $160,000 in scholarships (wonder where that money came from) for students in new programs build on this hydrogen-to-Germany scheme (“While none of these wind hydrogen programs have gotten the provincial government’s green light, the College of the North Atlantic has launched two new programs to feed the industry”), though the article includes some appropriate head-scratching: “There are questions about where these students will go once they graduate – because there won’t be any wind hydrogen programs up and running in the province yet.”
If we as a country can somehow accomplish that, what can/should we do about as huge a prize as BBC, a prize of immense benefit using a lot of existing infrastructure, at relatively low cost, to generate an incredibly valuable product? For $30 million per year? That can’t be much more than the travel budget of a couple dozen of Ottawa’s elite planet savers. To be less facetious, a CBC story pegs Ontario’s planned Stellantis battery plant as receiving $15 billion in subsidies; the entire program cost for BBC is two percent of that total.
Politicians, energy transitionists, Alberta business leaders: I suggest it is imperative you put your shoulder behind BBC, and you should all be kicking in a lot more than $300 million over ten years. Other countries will get there faster if you don’t.
We don’t need crazy new ideas that blow huge manhole covers into outer space, figuratively speaking, but which blow similar sized holes in governmental budgets. We just need to use what we have right in front of us.
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
A large ship being built to construct offshore wind farms in a way that complies with a labor union-backed law is behind schedule and over budget, compounding a series of setbacks that have complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to expand domestic wind energy, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A large ship being built to construct offshore wind farms in a way that complies with a labor union-backed law is behind schedule and over budget, compounding a series of setbacks that have complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to expand domestic wind energy, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Charybdis, a massive boat under construction in south Texas, would be the first vessel legally allowed and able to carry wind turbine components from an American port and then install turbines in the open ocean, the WSJ reported. The ship is about a year behind schedule, which has placed a strain on the offshore wind industry and made it less likely that the United States meets the Biden administration’s goal of producing 30 GW of wind energy by 2030.
In addition to being behind schedule, Charybdis is projected to have a final cost of $625 million, around double what a similar ship would cost elsewhere, according to analysts.
No existing American ships have the capability to install the wind turbines many energy firms have planned, and foreign vessels that can build them are not allowed to pick up components directly from American ports.
Rather than large foreign ships directly picking up turbine parts from American ports, smaller American boats will shuttle parts from ports to the farm sites where foreign ships then use their cranes to pick up the parts and begin construction.
Turbine blades can be larger than football fields, and turbine towers can stand as much as 600 feet above water.
Ørsted, a Danish wind energy company, contracted Charybdis to construct two wind farms off the coast of New York but has since had to explore alternative options due to the delays, the WSJ reported.
There is an ongoing shortage of construction ships, contributing to wind energy projects being canceled and delayed, according to the WSJ.
Other wind power companies have paid tens of millions of dollars to get out of contracts to sell energy to utility companies after they were unable to complete projects, citing inflation and supply chain difficulties.
Cancellations of wind energy projects have complicated the Biden administration’s clean energy goals. The United States is only on track to meet about half of its 2030 offshore wind energy goal, according to Reuters.
Delays and cancellations will likely drive up the prices Americans end up paying for wind energy, according to the WSJ.
The Biden administration has financially supported the wind industry through tax credits and manufacturing subsidies.
Despite federal support, some experts think taxpayers could be on the hook to bail out failing wind companies.
“No one should doubt the willingness of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to try to spend billions more debt-funded dollars to bail out their pet offshore wind industry,” David Blackmon, an energy consultant, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The AFL-CIO did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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