Investor’s Business Daily
Barack Obama meets with Al Gore to discuss global warming, green jobs and his energy team. Did they also discuss how their policies will put America’s ailing economy in a deep freeze? In advance of the naming of an energy secretary, an EPA administrator and a new climate czar, the president-elect consulted Tuesday in Chicago with the oracle of climate change. “How policies in this area can stimulate the economy and create jobs” was the topic, according to a transition team spokesperson.
Which reminded us that seven months ago, Obama promised that “Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem.” That’s what we’re afraid of. In a video presentation to a U.N. conference held to revive the Kyoto Treaty approach, Obama concurred with Gore that warming science is “beyond dispute and the facts are clear.” “Sea levels are rising,” he asserted, “coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen drought spreading famine, and storms are growing stronger with each passing season.” Problem is, none of it’s true.
The Gore-Obama meeting followed an announcement by researchers at Florida State University that the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years. Then there was a report in November on cyclone activity showing storm durations and wind speeds in 2007 and 2008 were among the lowest since reliable global satellite data became available three decades ago.
As for those coastlines, studies by the International Commission on Sea Level Changes and others show ocean levels in recent decades have actually fallen. The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
Due to a decline in solar activity and other factors, the Earth is cooling, and has been since 1998. A peer-reviewed study published in April by Nature predicted the world will continue cooling at least through 2015. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.
Meteorologist and Weather Channel founder John Coleman notes that a significant natural warming trend peaked in 1998 with lots of sunspots and solar flares. Now the sun has gone quiet with fewer sunspots, and global temperatures have gone into decline. “Earth,” he says, “has cooled for almost 10 straight years.”
So why in an economy reeling from a market collapse are we still considering emission controls certain to kill both jobs and economic growth? The EPA said the cap-and-trade lunacy of the recently stalled Lieberman-Warner bill would have caused a loss of $3 trillion in GDP in a $14 trillion economy. An analysis by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation concluded that passage of Lieberman-Warner would by 2030 cost the average American household $6,752 a year, with job losses as much as four million. The Earth is cooling. So is the economy. It’s time to step on the gas, not regulate it. See post here.
By EurActiv
Despite “significant steps” taken to soften the impact of the EU’s climate change goals on its industry, Italy yesterday (8 December) continued to maintain a tough negotiating line ahead of a decisive EU summit on 11-12 December. During separate meetings of foreign affairs and energy ministers in Brussels, the Italian government firmly restated its intention to obtain exemptions from the package for its energy-intensive industrial sectors such as paper, glass, steel and brick industries.
“It is one of our red lines,” stressed Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, formerly vice-president of the European Commission. Under the draft package to be discussed by EU heads of state and government this week, energy-intensive industries will be asked, as of 2013, to gradually pay for the right to emit CO2. But Italy, Germany and other Eastern European countries claim the rules, if applied too strictly, will force energy-intensive sectors to close down factories and move abroad, leading to job losses and rising CO2 emissions outside Europe -’carbon leakage’.
Most EU countries seem ready to make concessions to those industries and the diplomatic battle is now focusing on how to measure the actual risk for individual sectors which claim to be more exposed than others to international competition. Diplomats will gather in Brussels on 10 December to attempt striking a deal ahead of meeting of EU leaders at the end of the week, where decisions on the package will have to be taken by unanimity.
As one of its “red lines”, Rome is pushing for the inclusion of a general revision clause for the entire package after a UN conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will aim to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Italy wants to link the implementation of the EU climate package to the outcome of the Copenhagen talks, namely in the form of a commitment from the US and China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. China and the US currently have no binding commitment to reduce their emissions and getting them onboard is one of the EU’s main objectives in the negotiation.
EU energy minister made more concessions to Italy by introducing a mid-term review clause (in 2014) to a proposal aimed at boosting the share of renewable energies to 20% of the EU’s energy mix by 2020 (see Links Dossier). “The compromise makes clear that the mid-term targets will be only indicative and not binding as we requested,” the Italian minister for economic development Claudio Scajola told journalists after the Energy Council on Monday (8 December). However, the revision clause will not put into question the 20% target by 2020, stressed Jean-Louis Borloo, French Energy minister, who was chairing the meeting. The European Parliament will now be asked to give its green light to the deal in a vote scheduled on 17 December.
Benny Peiser Note: I expect that the EU summit at the weekend will come up with a very similar fudge - as usual. I also expect that the green media and climate activists are likely to hail it as a ‘historic’ breakthrough - as usual. But let’s not beat around the bush: whatever the EU summit may or may not decide at the weekend, you can be absolutely sure that it will not be legally binding targets. This original plan has now been abandoned - full stop. Without binding targets, however, the EU will signal unambiguously that it is waiting for the rest of the world to move - before it will make ‘any’ binding commitments. And that, we know, could take for ever.
By Quirin Schiermeier, Nature
As international climate talks began last week in Poland, the United Nations (UN) suspended the work of the main company that validates carbon-offset projects in developing countries, sending shockwaves through the emissions-trading business. Environmental groups have criticized the social impact of the Xiaoxi hydropower station. Based in Oslo, Det Norske Veritas has in the past four years validated and certified almost half of the 1,200 projects approved under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
At its meeting on 28 November in Poznan, the CDM’s executive board temporarily withdrew Det Norske Veritas’s accreditation after a spot check carried out in early November at the firm’s headquarters revealed serious flaws in project management. The board did not specify which projects are affected, but cites problems with the company’s internal auditing processes, and says that one of its staff members was verifying CDM projects without proper qualifications. As a result, “validation activities could not be demonstrated to be based on appropriate sectoral expertise”, the board reports.
Det Norske Veritas is a risk-assessment and consulting company with about 8,000 employees in more than 100 countries. Its 2007 revenue was 8 billion Norwegian krone (US$1.1 billion). It was the largest of 19 companies entitled to validate and certify projects proposed under the CDM, which aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by promoting climate-friendly energy technologies, such as wind or hydropower.
Certified emission-reduction credits from verified projects can be traded and sold on the emissions market, helping industrialized countries to meet their emissions-reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol. However, only environmentally sustainable projects that would demonstrably not go ahead without additional revenue from sales of these credits are meant to be approved. See full story here. As one fellow scientist so aptly noted “how can a concern set up on fradulent premises to carry out a fraudulent mission be suspended for fraudulent practices?”