Forget Paris Because Asia is Building 500
New Coal Power Plants This Year Alone With 1000+ More In
Planning. Here's A Good Start - India Outlaws Greenpeace Because They Consider Greenpeace A
‘Threat To National Economic Security’.
The shine is coming
off once bright prospects for natural gas as the future fossil fuel of choice
in Asia as power companies in India and Southeast Asia tap abundant and cheap
domestic coal resources to generate electricity. In Asia alone this year power
companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a
thousand more on planning boards. “Coal is still the cheapest and the fuel that
most Asian countries will use,” said Loreta G. Ayson, undersecretary at the
Philippine Department of Energy. --Florence Tan and Henning Gloystein, Reuters, 3 November 2015
Fracking and other new drilling techniques can nearly double the available
supplies of oil and gas in the next 35 years, according to BP. In a report
published yesterday, the oil major says that this impending glut of
hydrocarbons has demolished fears that the world is running out of oil. Mr
Eyton added: “Energy resources are plentiful. Concerns over running out of oil
and gas have disappeared.” --Robin Pagnamenta, The Times, 3 November 2015
Ahead of the crucial climate change summit in Paris, India and Africa on
Thursday urged developed nations to undertake “ambitious” mitigation measures
to reduce carbon emissions and “honour” their commitment of providing financial
resources and technology to developing countries. “Excess of few cannot become
the burden of many”, asserted Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had earlier
invited African countries to join an alliance of solar-rich nations that he
would announce on November 30 at crucial climate Summit in Paris. --Press Trust of India, 31 October
2015
The green energy transition is becoming ever more expensive for consumers. By
the end of 2016 an average household will incur additional charges of
approximately 540 euros. This is evident from calculations by the Institute of
the German Economy in Cologne (IW Köln) seen by Welt am Sonntag. “Most
subsidies are politically questionable,” said IW energy expert Esther
Chrischilles, because they hit those on lower incomes particularly hard.
--Martin Greive and Daniel Wetzel, Welt am Sonntag, 1 November 2015
President Obama’s environmental agenda hangs in the balance as federal courts
consider whether his administration overstepped its authority in drafting a
host of regulations designed to combat pollution and climate change. It’s now
up to a select group of judges — many appointed by Republican presidents — to
shape Obama’s environmental and climate legacy by deciding the regulations pass
legal muster. --Timothy Cama, The Hill, 2 November 2015
On a whim, I downloaded the monthly expenditure details from the Department of
International Development for August 2015, the most recent figures available. I
don’t know about you but you could get the impression that a great deal of what
DFiD reports as overseas aid spending is actually bungs to environmentalists.
--Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 29 October 2015
UK Turns To Diesel
To Meet Power Supply Crunch Britain is set to
grant hundreds of millions of pounds in subsidies to highly polluting diesel
generators as a way to help solve the energy supply crunch facing the country
over the next 15 years. If all of those registered are successful in their bids
— which analysts believe is likely — it could cost the taxpayer £436m, provide
enough energy to power more than 1m homes and emit several million tonnes of
CO2 a year. The subsidies on offer are so appealing that even solar-power
developers are building diesel generation on their sites as a way of maximising
their returns. --Kiran Stacey, Financial Times, 4 November 2015
A
second act in Volkswagen’s massive emissions scandal just began. Late on
Tuesday night VW Group announced that the company had identified
“irregularities in CO2 levels” which had emerged as part of internal
investigations. As many as 800,000 vehicles could be affected across the entire
group, according to the release. Shares are getting crushed in early European
trading, down by as much as 10%, pushing the price below €100. --Mike Bird, Business Insider UK, 4 November 2015
China,
the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, is burning far more
annually than previously thought, according to new government data. The finding
could vastly complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming.
Even for a country of China’s size and opacity, the scale of the correction is
immense. China has been consuming as much as 17 percent more coal each year
than reported, according to the new government figures. By some initial
estimates, that could translate to almost a billion more tons of carbon dioxide
released into the atmosphere annually in recent years, more than all of Germany
emits from fossil fuels. “It’s created a lot of consternation,” he said. “Our
basic data will have to be adjusted, and the international agencies will also
have to adjust their databases. This is troublesome because many forecasts and
commitments were based on the previous data.” --Chris Buckley, The New York Times, 4 November 2015
This year’s UN climate conference, the 21st, will take place in Paris just one
month after All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day. The climate treaty under
negotiation is like a vampire from a bad old horror film. Every time you think
it’s dead, it rises from the grave. This vampire is not sucking blood, but
money and resources from taxpayers and needy people around the world. It’s time
to put a stake through its heart and cut off the head of this climate-treaty
monstrosity once and for all. Congressional Republicans are working to do just
that. Without Senate ratification, any climate agreement coming out of Paris,
just like Obama’s executive orders and climate regulations, can be undone by
his successors. Republicans have already made it clear that the Senate will not
ratify any agreement Obama makes requiring either steep, economy-killing,
greenhouse-gas emission reductions or climate payoffs to developing countries.
--H. Sterling Burnett, National Review, 21 October 2015
For investors in yieldco stocks, it’s been a quick and wild ride. Two years
ago, yield companies like TerraForm Power Inc. and NRG Yield Inc. were the
newest, hottest thing for energy investors — a way to make steady returns off
the booming clean energy sector. Share values soared after they were spun off
by parent companies eager to cash in. Today, those same parent entities have
put as much as $26 billion worth of sales to their affiliates on hold after the
market value cratered. Given the drop in their values, yieldcos effectively
have lost their sense of purpose, which was to use their shares to buy new
plants. --Mark Chediak and Chris Martin, Bloomberg, 3 November 2015
In spring 2013 the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) published a brochure
directed against journalists who reported on doubts about the predictions by
the IPCC and PIK. Unusually for a government agency, the brochure mentions the
names of some journalists whose articles allegedly “do not conform with the
established scientific knowledge.” Martin Schneider, Chairman of the Science
Press Conference (WPK) declared: “It is not for a government institution to
determine which opinions may and which may not be expressed. Journalists may
and must represent different positions, and they may and must again and again
question established scientists.” Furthermore, it could not be the task of a
public authority to declare, quasi officially, certain scientific positions as
official truth. --Michael Miersch, Global Warming Policy Forum, 4 November 2015
On
November 4, the Indian government cancelled Greenpeace India Society’s
registration. According to the notice issued by the Tamil Nadu Registrar of
Societies, Greenpeace India society’s registration was cancelled for
“fraudulently” conducting their business by falsifying balance sheets, and
other violations of the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act of 1975. --Shreya
Dasgupta, Mongabay, 6 November 2015
India’s domestic spy service has accused Greenpeace and other lobby groups of
hurting economic progress by campaigning against power projects, mining and
genetically modified food, the most serious charge yet against foreign-funded
organisations. “A significant number of Indian NGOs funded by donors based in
US, UK, Germany and Netherlands have been noticed to be using people-centric
issues to create an environment, which lends itself to stalling development
projects,” the Intelligence Bureau said. These included coal-fired power
projects, genetically modified organisms, mega industrial projects including
South Korean firm POSCO’s steel plant and Vedanta’s bauxite project both in
Odisha, hyro-power projects in Arunachal Pradesh, the strategic state on the
border with China. --Reuters, 12 June 2014
A top Republican is threatening the head of the government’s climate research
arm with criminal prosecution if the agency does not hand over materials
related to a climate change study that shows there has been no “pause” in
global warming. Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House
Science, Space and Technology Committee, sent a letter to the head of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Wednesday asking for all
correspondence between the agency and outside sources about the study’s
release. “Your failure to comply with the committee’s subpoena has delayed the
committee’s investigation and thwarted the committee’s constitutional
obligation to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Smith said in the
Wednesday letter to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan. “Furthermore, your
failure to comply with a duly issued subpoena may expose you to civil and/or
criminal enforcement mechanisms.” --John Siciliano, The Washington Examiner, 4 November 2015
Last month, the House Science Committee, chaired by Lamar Smith (R-Texas),
subpoenaed NOAA for data and communications relating to Karl’s article. NOAA is
refusing to give up the documents, citing confidentiality concerns and the
integrity of the scientific process. Is the subpoena harassment or appropriate
constitutional oversight? There are two legitimate concerns here. The first is
data quality, an issue that needs to be resolved owing to the central role that
this data set is playing in U.S. climate policy. The second issue is arguably
more worrisome and difficult to uncover: a potential alliance between NOAA
scientists and Obama administration officials that might be biasing and
spinning climate science to support a political agenda. --Judith Curry, Fox News, 5 November 2015
When it comes to climate change, many Chinese just aren’t as fussed as they
used to be. That is among the key findings of global polling by the U.S.-based
Pew Research Center, which found less than one-fifth of Chinese surveyed viewed
climate change as a very serious problem, down 23 percentage points from
polling five years ago. At the same time, a growing segment in China also said
climate change was not much of a problem at all. 19% of Chinese said global
climate change was “not too serious” of a problem this year, versus just 6% in
2010 results. --The Wall Street Journal, 6 November 2015
The
opening of an investigation of Exxon Mobil by the New York attorney general’s
office into the company’s record on climate change may well spur legal
inquiries into other oil companies, according to legal and climate experts,
although successful prosecutions are far from assured. Many oil companies have
funded lobbying efforts and research on climate change, so prosecutors would
most likely be able to search through vast amounts of material. Energy experts
said prosecutors may decide to investigate companies that chose to fund or join
organizations that questioned climate science or policies designed to address
the problem, such as the Global Climate Coalition and the American Legislative
Exchange Council, to see if discrepancies exist between the companies’ public
and private statements. --Clifford Krauss, The New York Times, 6 November 2015
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