At Last UK Said To Seek End For 2020 Renewables Target

Scientific Advice Promoting Diesel ‘Was Wrong’, Former Chief Scientist Admits

 

Brought to you by Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum

Britain is looking for ways to scrap its 2020 clean energy targets while maintaining everyday trade in Europe’s energy market, an early sign of the kind of cherry-picking that threatens to sour Brexit negotiations. Erasing the target would allow Britain to skirt fines that could reach 10s of millions of pounds since it’s on track to narrowly miss the 2020 goal. It would also move the U.K. out of step with other European Union nations that maintain targets as part of their membership in the region’s energy market. --Bloomberg, 5 April 2016
 

 

The chief scientist under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has admitted successive governments were wrong to encourage people to buy diesel vehicles. Sir David King, the chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007 and special representative for climate change until last week, said that the government had overestimated the impact of European regulations when it decided to encourage people to buy diesel vehicles from 2001 onwards. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that meeting CO₂ targets, which were part of the climate change agenda, was the priority at the time. “What was on our minds very heavily was how do we reduce carbon dioxide emissions given the challenge of climate change. Diesel-driven vehicles can do more miles per gallon and it seemed an obvious way forward to go down the diesel route.” --Sam Coates, The Times, 5 April 2017  

The scientist behind the dash for diesel is a committed climate change activist who once described global warming as a greater threat than terrorism. Professor Sir David King, 77, was the architect of the policy to cut fuel duty for diesel cars as Tony Blair’s personal scientist. Yesterday he admitted he got it wrong, having been driven by an obsession with carbon emissions. --Victoria Allen, Daily Mail, 5 April 2017 

As confessions of incompetence go, Sir David King’s admission that he was absolutely wrong to advocate diesel cars could hardly be more damning. In his role as the former chief scientific adviser to the government – and until last month, special representative for climate change – this is a man on whom the public were entitled to rely for scrupulously impartial judgment, based on facts. His confession comes too late for millions who tried to do the environmentally friendly thing by switching from petrol after Labour cut diesel fuel duty in 2001. Nor can it help those whose health has suffered from diesel pollutants, which are linked to dementia and childhood breathing problems and, most chilling of all, are said to contribute to thousands of deaths. How many other crimes against the environment, health – and our wallets –have been committed in the name of green zealotry? --Editorial, Daily Mail, 5 April 2017 

The recent El Nino is cooling down as shown clearly in both sea surface temperatures and lower troposphere air temperatures. The two relevant data sets are UAH v.6 and HadSSTv3.1 now provide averages for the month of March 2017. The cooling pattern continues in the tropical seas while ocean temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) are  flat.  Southern Hemisphere (SH) oceans appear to be peaking and pulled the Global SST up a bit, but both are slightly below last March. --Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 4 April 2017 

China turbo-charged its lending to overseas energy projects last year, burnishing the attraction of its “infrastructure diplomacy” to the developing world and reinforcing its position as the dominant supplier of global development finance as Donald Trump draws back on such US funding abroad. A new database shows that lending by China’s two global development banks rose 40 per cent last year to $48.4bn — a figure estimated to be several times the total funds allocated to energy infrastructure by the World Bank and other western-backed lending agencies. Much of China’s lending to oil, gas, coal, hydropower and other energy facilities in 2016 was directed toward the developing world and in particular to countries covered by “One Belt One Road”, a key geopolitical strategy championed by Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. --James Kynge, Financial Times, 4 April 2017

India has an estimated 96 trillion cubic feet of recoverable shale gas reserves and the government is eager to tap them. Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and Oil India have already spent Rs 199.47 crore on shale gas exploration in the country. --Pramod Thomas, The New Indian Express, 4 April 2017