I noticed a news item a couple of days ago that India has declared Greenpeace and FoE Threats to National Energy Security. The Indian government is of course wrong. Greenpeace and Foe are threats to Global Energy Security, not just national energy security, and all praise to those governments, led by the Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada, who have recognised the international threat. Meanwhile, the Kenyan Community Organiser continues to dominate world news dressed in the hooped trousers and over-sized shoes that has become the uniform of the True Believers.
Several news outlets are reporting the equivalent of “Dog Bites Man”, that is, that international talks designed to thresh out the future of carbon trading have collapsed with no agreement.
The use of carbon markets to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions was dealt a blow on Sunday after two weeks of United Nations talks on designing and reforming the mechanisms ended in deadlock.
thanx for the new unthreaded thread, jo. with so many hundreds of millions distracted by the FIFA World Cup (including me), a helluva lot of CAGW propaganda is being pushed out, so this thread is much appreciated. i’ve posted some pieces on the “weekend unthreaded” thread. this is a followup to Peter Hannam/SMH’s article, “Models ‘grossly underestimate’ costs of global warming, Nicholas Stern says” which anthony has on WUWT ($260/ton for carbon – the price of salvation) as well:
Tim Worstall/Forbes claims the MSM is doing the usual beat-up:
16 June: Forbes: Tim Worstall: Lord Stern’s New Climate Change Economics Paper Finds The Carbon Tax Should Be Lower
There’s breathless reporting over in the Independent about the new paper on the economics of climate change from Nicholas, Lord Stern. Apparently the new calculations change everything and tell us that we really must pull our fingers out and get on with imposing really strict restrictions on how much CO2 anyone is allowed to omit.
The real point about this paper though is that it doesn’t in fact uncover anything new at all, despite the quite heroic attempts it makes to big up the size of the problem. The final answers are around and about the same as we get either from the original Stern Review or from William Nordhaus’ original DICE model. And that is, as I say, after the quite excessive attempts to make sure that the problem is going to be very bad indeed.
Here’s how the propaganda offensive starts out in the newspaper: …BLAHBLAH…
Yet when we actually go to read the paper itself (this is the freely available working version) that’s not actually the result we end up with at all. What we do end up with is that a carbon tax to avoid all of this nastiness should (dependent upon the specific model we use) be maybe $30 a tonne CO2-e today, rising to $250 a tonne in a few decades, or in the other version it should be $75 a tonne as a flat rate now and into the future. And the thing about these numbers are that that first low and rising tax is exactly what the original Nordhaus model recommends and that higher flat one is exactly what the Stern Review recommended. So despite their bigging up the problems they’ve ended up with exactly the same answers that we’ve all been accepting for most of the past decade. Depending upon how important you think working with the capital cycle is we should either have a low carbon tax now and make sure it rises into the future or we should have a medium level one right now… http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/06/16/lord-sterns-new-climate-change-economics-paper-finds-the-carbon-tax-should-be-lower/
17 June: BusinessSpectator: Reuters: Beijing emitters ‘ignoring carbon scheme’
More than a quarter of all companies covered by Beijing’s municipal carbon laws ignored a key reporting deadline, local media reported Friday, with some powerful companies questioning the local government trading body’s authority to regulate them….
Some of the firms implied that Beijing’s Development and Reform Commission (DRC), which operates the scheme, did not have the authority to issue orders.
“It ends up like this because they don’t follow our rules and the document shown to us does not fit the requirements,” Zhou Jiancheng, vice director of planning and statistics at the Beijing Railway Bureau, one of the firms that failed to submit the report, told newspaper Beijing Youth Daily.
He said the company would have to see a “red-header document” before they would submit the emissions report.
In China, a “red-header document” normally refers to orders issued by the highest levels of government, whose name would be printed in red on the letterhead…
A new law mandates all companies to follow environmental regulations regardless of the authority level, but that does not enter into force until next year and it remains to be seen how successful it will be…
Beijing, where companies must hand over permits to the government to cover for their 2013 emissions by June 15, is only the latest of several local governments struggling to enforce its carbon scheme.
Guangdong province and the cities of Shenzhen and Tianjin have also found it difficult to convince local firms to follow the rules… http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2014/6/17/policy-politics/beijing-emitters-ignoring-carbon-scheme
16 June: CaribbeanLifeNews: Jewel Fraser: Carbon neutral tourism falters in Tobago
An initiative to reduce the carbon footprint of Tobago’s tourism sector may be stymied by “bread-and-butter issues” and the failure of government authorities to vigorously pursue the initiative.
In 2012, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) completed a pilot project for the Caribbean Carbon Neutral Tourism Programme (CCNTP) in four Caribbean countries, including Tobago, with the aim of enhancing the tourism sector’s resilience to climate change.
However, the initiative in Tobago has borne little fruit, with some who work in the sector saying they learned about the programme only from media reports.
***The initial phase of the CCNTP focused on assessing the carbon footprint of the tourism sector in four islands — the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados and Tobago. With that in mind, an online carbon footprint assessment tool was created that would allow persons working in the tourism sector in those islands to analyse how much carbon emissions their business was producing…
Turpin added that it would be left up to the private sector and NGOs to move forward with any carbon neutral tourism programme in Tobago.
Alvin Benjamin, a taxi driver operating in Tobago’s tourism industry, told IPS that he heard about the carbon neutral programme “only on the radio.” “I think it was a good idea, but I still was waiting to see what would be the outcome.”
He and Victor Emily, who founded the Royal Taxi service, said that some of the recommendations from the CCNTP were not feasible in Tobago.
One of the recommendations coming out of the CCNTP was the “structuring of operations in land based tours, whereby operators collaborate to share vehicles and associated costs [which] allows for a reduced number of trips of vehicles and also helps to reduce the environmental impact on the local destinations [which may be protected areas, eco-sensitive areas etc.].”…
Emily told IPS that many taxi drivers work for themselves. “It’s not a case where taxi drivers are working for a company and they get a salary. You have to make your money so that pooling in the transporting of tourists would be a no-no.”…
Echoing similar concerns, Dexter Black, president of the Reef Tour Operators, told IPS: “People want to work by themselves.”…
“As it is now, everybody is going about business as usual. [Reducing carbon emissions] is not much of a concern. The greater concern is bread and butter issues. But if people are sensitised and educated, they will respond. People are always willing to learn.”…
Gerard Alleng, an official of the IDB, which funded the pilot project of the CCNTP, told IPS that the programme would be helpful to islands when it came to branding their product.
“We are in a competitive environment and there is a lot of interest now by clients of tourism to be more conscious of the environment. If islands are able to transform their sector to a low-carbon sector, they would be able to attract those clients who are concerned about the carbon footprint, about climate change, about their impact on the environment.”
He said the carbon footprint assessment tool “was a way of giving these islands a tool they could use to move in that direction.”
There is also the issue of energy security, Alleng said. Since energy prices are high in the Caribbean, a low-carbon, more energy efficient tourism sector would bring “significant economic benefits.” http://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2014/6/2014_06_12_ips_carbon_neutral_tourism.html
THIS NONSENSE ACTUALLY BEGAN IN 2009, & ALL THAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED IS THE WEB-BASED CARBON FOOTPRINTING TOOL! lol.
Dec 2012: IPS: Frolic Barefoot, But Don’t Leave a Carbon Footprint
Three years ago, the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) signed a 1.8-million-dollar agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to enhance climate resilience in the tourism sector, and work towards designating the Caribbean a carbon neutral destination.
***Programme coordinator Earl Green told IPS said that the project’s main outcome is the development of a web-based carbon footprinting tool, which provides a common platform for development of tourism sector greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories in the region.
The agreement with the IDB called for the development of suitable financing mechanisms, which would be needed to support investments in adaptation and mitigation measures within the tourism sector in order to facilitate climate resilience and carbon neutrality.
It also called for the development of a strategic framework to access the Climate Investment Funds -Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) under its Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR), that would attract concessional financial options, including concessional loans, guarantees, grants, and equity enhancements that can be used by the region’s tourism sector for investing in climate resilient infrastructure and services…
The CCNTP programme was also piloted in the four Caribbean countries because the CCCCC said it felt there was need to take advantage of the results of the Review of the Economics of Climate Change Studies (RECCS) coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC).
“With the web-based tool, the pilot countries can now log-in and view their greenhouse gas emissions and even forecast what it will be in the future… http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/12/frolic-barefoot-but-dont-leave-a-carbon-footprint/
shilling for the now-discredited Pentagon Quadrennnial Defense Review. Japan’s Abe stood up for his country’s national interest when he met Obama in April:
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 18, No. 2, May 5, 2014.
Could a US-Japan “Green Alliance” Transform the Climate-Energy Equation?
by Andrew DeWit
US President Barack Obama’s April 23-25 visit to Japan unfortunately went pretty much as expected…
The US-Japan Joint Statement and Obama’s comments to the Yomiuri newspaper emphasized collaboration, including “coordination between our militaries.” But on energy, Team Abe and the nuclear village won out and the official depiction of collaboration was limited to “working together to promote the development of clean energy, including by facilitating business cooperation and deepening civil nuclear cooperation.” Japan’s April 11, 2014 “Strategic Energy Plan” – a plan without any targets for anything – was “welcomed,” whereas the US military’s target of 25% renewable energy by 2025 remained one unnoticed elephant among the herd in the room. Another elephant was the US military and “climate change,” which got three boilerplate mentions in the Joint Statement. There was no emphasis on US-Japan military cooperation on climate change, even though the US military itself has for years identified climate change as the mother of all threats, including fully 8 detailed references to “climate change” and its consequences in its March 4, 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR 2014)…
Compared to the IPCC, the US military is both more forthright in its assessments of climate change risk and realistic in its appraisal of the cost-cutting merits of renewable energy and efficiency. Consistent with several years of military-centred analyses, the QDR 2014 warns that the multiplicity of effects produced by climate change “will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.” The QDR 2014 also points out that the US military’s ambitious programs “to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resilience of our installations.”…
***The US military is not independently generating these analyses and cutting-edge mitigation-adaptation programs, but rather in cooperation with other federal agencies (especially the Department of Energy), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), Sandia National Laboratories, and other elements of what can legitimately be described as a green military-industrial complex…
The Abe efforts emphasize military initiatives with a surprisingly “hawkish” stress on being “battle oriented.” Yet green would seem the geopolitically safer and economically more rewarding option, as the US military’s QDR 2014/2010 and other analyses indicate…
The importance of the US-Japan green alliance initiatives transcends partisan politics. The reality in the US is that while the Obama administration talks of “all of the above” on energy, at the spearpoint of innovative deployment they are actually mobilizing the deliberately disruptive green military-industrial complex. Among a multitude of moves, their 2013 appointment of former ACORE head Dennis McGinn, an impressive exponent of renewables, to Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy and Installations, was a potent indicator of intent…
The Japanese sense of vulnerability on energy is grounded in the reality of possessing virtually no conventional resource endowments. It is now compounded by the desperation of extant vested energy interests. These actors’ political clout has impaired the country’s capacity to, as Bloomberg editor James Gibney exhorts, “make disaster the mother of invention” by using the Fukushima shock as a spur to “achieving sustainable, smart-energy self-sufficiency…
Failure to take this resource-lite road could lead the Japanese further towards the risk of conflict. Imagine for example that the Japanese follow Team Abe’s lead and lock themselves into reliance on depleting conventional resources, with or without the smidgeon of nuclear power they can realistically expect. And then ask what might happen if the Americans do not have the fracking abundance that their boosters claim to possess, a likelihood already gnawing at the banks and other players who have bet big money on the “shale revolution.”…
***As retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley, an expert on climate change, wrote in a Fox News editorial in an effort to shake some sense into the heads of denialists: “The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering. The decisions made in 1914 reflected political policies pursued for short-term gains and benefits, coupled with institutional hubris, and a failure to imagine and understand the risks or to learn from recent history.” That pretty much summarizes the irresponsibility of leaving green off the table between Obama and Abe. The risks exacerbated by re-affirming the status quo are precisely the kinds of risks that the US green military-industrial complex is aimed at. So the Obama regime and other players should think of how to push the promising arrow of an expanded green alliance into the Abe and METI bubble of complacency. And perhaps the Japanese and international media should be asking why green collaboration was not at the centre of that Abe-Obama negotiating table at this historic time, when an embryonic green alliance already exists. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/4111
(About the Writer above: Andrew DeWit is Professor in Rikkyo University’s School of Policy Studies and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. His recent publications include “Climate Change and the Military Role in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response,” in Paul Bacon and Christopher Hobson (eds) Human Security and Japan’s Triple Disaster (Routledge, 2014), “Japan’s renewable power prospects,” in Jeff Kingston (ed)Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2013), and (with Kaneko Masaru and Iida Tetsunari) “Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11 (Routledge, 2012). He is lead researcher for a five-year (2010-2015) Japanese-Government funded project on the political economy of the Feed-in Tariff.)
31 March: Fox News: Time for real leadership on climate change, energy, national security
By David M. Slayton and David Titley (retired Navy Rear Admiral)
(David M. Slayton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Co-Chair of the Hoover Institution’s Arctic Security Initiative.
David Titley is a Professor of Practice in Meteorology at Penn State and the founding director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk.)
The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering…
Once again nations face a challenge – climate change — which, if left unmanaged, has the potential to bring tremendous pain to tens of millions of people, and disrupt seriously the existing economic, political, and security orders of the day…
We must incentivize and transform research and development into reliable and economically viable low to no carbon baseline power generation and transportation fuels; a revenue-neutral carbon tax is a great place to start…
Ubiquitous non-carbon based power and clean water can change the world in a huge way – for the better – and the U.S. can lead the way…
The U.S. Department of Defense in its recently released Quadrennial Defense Review treats climate change in a strategically coherent manner – linking its impacts with other global trends such as population change, growing affluence and globalization… http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/31/time-for-real-leadership-on-climate-change-energy-national-security/?intcmp=trending
GREAT NEWS. Voice of Russia is basically the Reuters report below, but the headline is sharper:
16 June: Voice of Russia: UN climate talks on Sunday fail to predict future of carbon markets
The use of carbon markets to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions was dealt a blow on Sunday after two weeks of United Nations talks on designing and reforming the mechanisms ended in deadlock.
The negotiations, held as part of UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, made scant progress as envoys representing almost 200 nations tied reforms to progress under the wider discussions and remained entrenched in diverse positions.
The deadlock gives investors little sign that there will be a pickup in demand under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the UN ‘s current main carbon market which has seen activity dry up after assignment over $400 billion into emission-cutting projects in developing countries over the past decade.
It also offers no guidance on how the growing patchwork of national and regional carbon markets worldwide will fit into a future international framework to tackle climate change.
“We believe there is a future for markets … (but) to agree on something that wouldn’t be robust enough for us to engage on later on would just not make any sense,” Elina Bardram told journalists at a briefing after the talks ended on Sunday…
Poorer nations have been more wary, particularly as most CDM investment went to wealthier emerging economies such as Brazil and China and to industrial gas destruction projects, which generated healthy profits for companies but led to little sustainable development and had their environmental integrity questioned…
Framework fails
In a separate strand of the talks, governments failed to make much progress on efforts to launch a platform to help set common standards and accounting rules for reducing emissions and tie together national and regional emissions trading schemes…
Separate text listing elements of such a platform, referred to as a “Framework for Various Approaches”, was promoted by a group of richer nations including United States and Japan, which are both designing their own programs to use foreign carbon credits.
But this was removed after meeting resistance from developing nations, which first want rich governments to take on deeper emission reduction targets at home…
The EU, whose preparations towards a new global climate deal have not included additional demand for foreign carbon credits to 2030, has been criticized by investor groups for undermining its leadership role in new carbon market development…
The UN talks are scheduled to resume at the next negotiating round in December in Lima, Peru. http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_06_16/UN-climate-talks-on-Sunday-fail-to-predict-future-of-carbon-markets-9810/
More than a couple of times Pat’s renderings has supplied me with, if not the actual stick, then the link to it and allowed me to prod a rabid CAGW miscreant. 🙂
I also support Pat although in the past I was critical of the sheer volume. The fact is that volume is pulled out of the news feeds by Pat, consolidated and condensed by Pat and sometimes off topic, often placed here when it is very on topic. All at what must be considerable effort for Pat
Given that Nature conducts its own form of geo-engineering on a scale that makes the proposed mankind created geo engineering projects look like the bite of a mite on an elephant flea’s gonads then any proposed geo-engineering is likely to just like trying to prevent the non existent, supposedly human created Catastrophic Global Warming.
It will be nothing more than another immense destruction of global economic wealth and of human lives and of living standards for absolutely no minutely perceivable benefit of any sort to man, beast or climate.
A few of those known natural climate geo – engineering occurences
1 / AIRA, JAPAN SUPER VOLCANO
One of the most recently troubling calderas in the world is the 150-square-mile Aira caldera in southern Japan, on the edge of which sits the city of Kagoshima.
The biggest eruptions took place 22,000 years ago when 14 cubic miles of material burped out of the ground and formed the Aira caldera, which is now largely Kagoshima Bay. That is equal to about 50 Mount St. Helens eruptions.
2 / VALLES CALDERA, NEW MEXICO SUPER VOLCANO
There is a sleeping monster in the heart of New Mexico.
The 175-square-mile Valles caldera forms a large pock in the middle of northern New Mexico, west of Santa Fe. It last exploded 1.2 million and 1.6 million years ago, piling up 150 cubic miles of rock and blasting ash as far away as Iowa. That’s equivalent to roughly 2,000 Mount St. Helens eruptions.
Around the fractured ring of Valles caldera, lava flows from after the major eruptions built up mountains and left obsidian flows as recently as 60,000 years ago. As with other calderas, there are still signs of heat below: hot springs are still active around Valles.
Geologists suspect the cause of Valles caldera has something to do with how the western United States’ portion of the North American tectonic plate is being pulled apart. Will Valles erupt again? No one knows.
3 / LAKE TAUPO, NEW ZEALAND SUPER VOLCANO
New Zealand’s Taupo caldera has been filled by water, creating what many describe as one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes.
Lake Taupo itself was created by a massive eruption 26,500 years ago. The caldera — the collapsed and subsided basin left after the huge eruption — became today’s lake. But Taupo did not die. The 485-square-mile caldera let loose again in the year A.D. 181, with estimates of ash and magma reaching as high as 22 cubic miles. That’s on the order of a hundred times more than Mount St. Helens. Today Lake Taupo still shows signs of life, which New Zealanders have put to good use. Ample hot springs and other hydrothermal activity enable New Zealand to generate about 8 percent of its electricity at a geothermal plant on the north side of Lake Taupo, at Wairakei.
4 / LONG VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Second only to Yellowstone in North America is the Long Valley caldera, in east-central California.
The 200-square-mile caldera is just south of Mono Lake, near the Nevada state line. The biggest eruption from Long Valley was 760,000 years ago, which unleashed 2,000 to 3,000 times as much lava and ash as Mount St. Helens, after which the caldera floor dropped about a mile, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Some of the ash reached as far east as Nebraska.
5 / LAKE TOBA, SUMATRA, INDONESIA SUPER VOLCANO
The 1,080-square-mile Toba caldera is the only supervolcano in existence that can be described as Yellowstone’s “big” sister.
About 74,000 years ago, Toba erupted and ejected almost three times as much volcanic ash as the most recent major Yellowstone eruption (Lava Creek, 630,000 years ago) and about 12 percent more than Yellowstone’s largest eruption (Huckleberry Ridge, 1.8 million years ago). That comes to several thousand times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980
__________________________
So despite those Super Volcano eruptions leading to globally shaking climate affecting outcomes due to the colossal amounts of ejecta , the effect on the global climate only lasted for a decade or two and then settled again into the climate of the previous era ;
The horribly abused thing called Climate that nobody can quite put a handle except it is “abused” in some way if you believe a few percent of the more mentally warped of the global population, is still here and seems to be rolling along just the same as it has always been. Or as Alice in Wonderland would put it, it’s never too hot and never too cold so lets leave it at that.
Mankind plus a few hundreds of millions of different species from viruses to whales are still here.
There’s a few more super volcanoes around that are busting to go off again in ten minutes to ten million years.
And there are as usual, a few way out whackos who call themselves scientists who are so up themselves in their own self promoting importance that they think that THEY can control and alter the Earth’s climate at their whim because they have some unfounded belief in some far out catastrophic ideology and dogma and they can do this WITHOUT asking anybody else or the 7.2 billions of ordinary people of this planet if THEY actually want anybody interfering or trying to interfere in what are entirely natural characteristics, the weather and climate of this world we live on.
Nobody can change the climate without first changing the weather.
Changing the weather to the extent it would change the climate needs at least a century and changing the weather for a fraction of that time would mean starvation on a colossal scale as crops world wide would be destroyed and the growing patterns of trees and all plant and animal life would be disrupted and destroyed .
But I guess those so called scientists are just too bloody dumb and self centred and ignorant of the real world and real people to ever think of that.
If those same way out self indulgent arrogant wannabe climate interfering whackos want an example of how to change the entire world and it’s climate, go ask those 200 million year old species of termites how to do it.
Because they did and it took fifty or so million years to do so.
And they were just one out of the millions of species down through time who have changed the global climate in both small and large ways.
And the result was mankind.
Thats US!
And this is the world and it’s climate that we live in today and which shaped us as a species.
There is no valid climate science, no competent climate scientists, and hence no rational governmental climate policy–even possible, much less in existence–today. All of our authoritative institutions–political, scientific, the media–are suborned, and the entire system is broken, from the top down in all areas. There is a crisis of general incompetence among scientists, across all fields, in defense of failed or failing theories and suppressive of correction by even the clearest of real-world observations.
Hoping Jo won’t mind, but note a new thread at Climate Audit where Aussie academics have not used good statistical method, a noted problem in all global warming work, highlighted for example by the Wegman reports to US Congress.
There is adequate evidence now to imply a past educational failure in Australia’s tertiary and associated institutions, which seems (thankfully) to be mostly limited to work on global warming and therefore a smaller target to correct.
The question is, how to correct it? Why not a few letters to Minister for Environment or whatever the full title is? (Greg Hunt, MP).
It is embarrassing to see Australian poor science time after time highlighted in world circles. This country can do better with its scarce research funds.
I noticed a news item a couple of days ago that India has declared Greenpeace and FoE Threats to National Energy Security. The Indian government is of course wrong. Greenpeace and Foe are threats to Global Energy Security, not just national energy security, and all praise to those governments, led by the Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada, who have recognised the international threat. Meanwhile, the Kenyan Community Organiser continues to dominate world news dressed in the hooped trousers and over-sized shoes that has become the uniform of the True Believers.
60
A given is that a state does not interfere in the internal affairs of another state, a matter related to acts of war.
A large multinational NGO interfering in the internal affairs of a state, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
20
Several news outlets are reporting the equivalent of “Dog Bites Man”, that is, that international talks designed to thresh out the future of carbon trading have collapsed with no agreement.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/un-climate-talks-fracture-over-future-of-carbon-markets-1.2676535
Many more takes on this around the Web, only a few extreme Green sites have found anything positive to extract from this.
50
For those of you who missed the latest news about the Climate Change Inquisition, a round-up of the Rossiter outrage. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/climate-mafia-chronicles.php
30
thanx for the new unthreaded thread, jo. with so many hundreds of millions distracted by the FIFA World Cup (including me), a helluva lot of CAGW propaganda is being pushed out, so this thread is much appreciated. i’ve posted some pieces on the “weekend unthreaded” thread. this is a followup to Peter Hannam/SMH’s article, “Models ‘grossly underestimate’ costs of global warming, Nicholas Stern says” which anthony has on WUWT ($260/ton for carbon – the price of salvation) as well:
Tim Worstall/Forbes claims the MSM is doing the usual beat-up:
16 June: Forbes: Tim Worstall: Lord Stern’s New Climate Change Economics Paper Finds The Carbon Tax Should Be Lower
There’s breathless reporting over in the Independent about the new paper on the economics of climate change from Nicholas, Lord Stern. Apparently the new calculations change everything and tell us that we really must pull our fingers out and get on with imposing really strict restrictions on how much CO2 anyone is allowed to omit.
The real point about this paper though is that it doesn’t in fact uncover anything new at all, despite the quite heroic attempts it makes to big up the size of the problem. The final answers are around and about the same as we get either from the original Stern Review or from William Nordhaus’ original DICE model. And that is, as I say, after the quite excessive attempts to make sure that the problem is going to be very bad indeed.
Here’s how the propaganda offensive starts out in the newspaper: …BLAHBLAH…
Yet when we actually go to read the paper itself (this is the freely available working version) that’s not actually the result we end up with at all. What we do end up with is that a carbon tax to avoid all of this nastiness should (dependent upon the specific model we use) be maybe $30 a tonne CO2-e today, rising to $250 a tonne in a few decades, or in the other version it should be $75 a tonne as a flat rate now and into the future. And the thing about these numbers are that that first low and rising tax is exactly what the original Nordhaus model recommends and that higher flat one is exactly what the Stern Review recommended. So despite their bigging up the problems they’ve ended up with exactly the same answers that we’ve all been accepting for most of the past decade. Depending upon how important you think working with the capital cycle is we should either have a low carbon tax now and make sure it rises into the future or we should have a medium level one right now…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/06/16/lord-sterns-new-climate-change-economics-paper-finds-the-carbon-tax-should-be-lower/
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17 June: BusinessSpectator: Reuters: Beijing emitters ‘ignoring carbon scheme’
More than a quarter of all companies covered by Beijing’s municipal carbon laws ignored a key reporting deadline, local media reported Friday, with some powerful companies questioning the local government trading body’s authority to regulate them….
Some of the firms implied that Beijing’s Development and Reform Commission (DRC), which operates the scheme, did not have the authority to issue orders.
“It ends up like this because they don’t follow our rules and the document shown to us does not fit the requirements,” Zhou Jiancheng, vice director of planning and statistics at the Beijing Railway Bureau, one of the firms that failed to submit the report, told newspaper Beijing Youth Daily.
He said the company would have to see a “red-header document” before they would submit the emissions report.
In China, a “red-header document” normally refers to orders issued by the highest levels of government, whose name would be printed in red on the letterhead…
A new law mandates all companies to follow environmental regulations regardless of the authority level, but that does not enter into force until next year and it remains to be seen how successful it will be…
Beijing, where companies must hand over permits to the government to cover for their 2013 emissions by June 15, is only the latest of several local governments struggling to enforce its carbon scheme.
Guangdong province and the cities of Shenzhen and Tianjin have also found it difficult to convince local firms to follow the rules…
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2014/6/17/policy-politics/beijing-emitters-ignoring-carbon-scheme
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16 June: CaribbeanLifeNews: Jewel Fraser: Carbon neutral tourism falters in Tobago
An initiative to reduce the carbon footprint of Tobago’s tourism sector may be stymied by “bread-and-butter issues” and the failure of government authorities to vigorously pursue the initiative.
In 2012, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) completed a pilot project for the Caribbean Carbon Neutral Tourism Programme (CCNTP) in four Caribbean countries, including Tobago, with the aim of enhancing the tourism sector’s resilience to climate change.
However, the initiative in Tobago has borne little fruit, with some who work in the sector saying they learned about the programme only from media reports.
***The initial phase of the CCNTP focused on assessing the carbon footprint of the tourism sector in four islands — the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados and Tobago. With that in mind, an online carbon footprint assessment tool was created that would allow persons working in the tourism sector in those islands to analyse how much carbon emissions their business was producing…
Turpin added that it would be left up to the private sector and NGOs to move forward with any carbon neutral tourism programme in Tobago.
Alvin Benjamin, a taxi driver operating in Tobago’s tourism industry, told IPS that he heard about the carbon neutral programme “only on the radio.” “I think it was a good idea, but I still was waiting to see what would be the outcome.”
He and Victor Emily, who founded the Royal Taxi service, said that some of the recommendations from the CCNTP were not feasible in Tobago.
One of the recommendations coming out of the CCNTP was the “structuring of operations in land based tours, whereby operators collaborate to share vehicles and associated costs [which] allows for a reduced number of trips of vehicles and also helps to reduce the environmental impact on the local destinations [which may be protected areas, eco-sensitive areas etc.].”…
Emily told IPS that many taxi drivers work for themselves. “It’s not a case where taxi drivers are working for a company and they get a salary. You have to make your money so that pooling in the transporting of tourists would be a no-no.”…
Echoing similar concerns, Dexter Black, president of the Reef Tour Operators, told IPS: “People want to work by themselves.”…
“As it is now, everybody is going about business as usual. [Reducing carbon emissions] is not much of a concern. The greater concern is bread and butter issues. But if people are sensitised and educated, they will respond. People are always willing to learn.”…
Gerard Alleng, an official of the IDB, which funded the pilot project of the CCNTP, told IPS that the programme would be helpful to islands when it came to branding their product.
“We are in a competitive environment and there is a lot of interest now by clients of tourism to be more conscious of the environment. If islands are able to transform their sector to a low-carbon sector, they would be able to attract those clients who are concerned about the carbon footprint, about climate change, about their impact on the environment.”
He said the carbon footprint assessment tool “was a way of giving these islands a tool they could use to move in that direction.”
There is also the issue of energy security, Alleng said. Since energy prices are high in the Caribbean, a low-carbon, more energy efficient tourism sector would bring “significant economic benefits.”
http://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2014/6/2014_06_12_ips_carbon_neutral_tourism.html
THIS NONSENSE ACTUALLY BEGAN IN 2009, & ALL THAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED IS THE WEB-BASED CARBON FOOTPRINTING TOOL! lol.
Dec 2012: IPS: Frolic Barefoot, But Don’t Leave a Carbon Footprint
Three years ago, the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) signed a 1.8-million-dollar agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to enhance climate resilience in the tourism sector, and work towards designating the Caribbean a carbon neutral destination.
***Programme coordinator Earl Green told IPS said that the project’s main outcome is the development of a web-based carbon footprinting tool, which provides a common platform for development of tourism sector greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories in the region.
The agreement with the IDB called for the development of suitable financing mechanisms, which would be needed to support investments in adaptation and mitigation measures within the tourism sector in order to facilitate climate resilience and carbon neutrality.
It also called for the development of a strategic framework to access the Climate Investment Funds -Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) under its Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR), that would attract concessional financial options, including concessional loans, guarantees, grants, and equity enhancements that can be used by the region’s tourism sector for investing in climate resilient infrastructure and services…
The CCNTP programme was also piloted in the four Caribbean countries because the CCCCC said it felt there was need to take advantage of the results of the Review of the Economics of Climate Change Studies (RECCS) coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC).
“With the web-based tool, the pilot countries can now log-in and view their greenhouse gas emissions and even forecast what it will be in the future…
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/12/frolic-barefoot-but-dont-leave-a-carbon-footprint/
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shilling for the now-discredited Pentagon Quadrennnial Defense Review. Japan’s Abe stood up for his country’s national interest when he met Obama in April:
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 18, No. 2, May 5, 2014.
Could a US-Japan “Green Alliance” Transform the Climate-Energy Equation?
by Andrew DeWit
US President Barack Obama’s April 23-25 visit to Japan unfortunately went pretty much as expected…
The US-Japan Joint Statement and Obama’s comments to the Yomiuri newspaper emphasized collaboration, including “coordination between our militaries.” But on energy, Team Abe and the nuclear village won out and the official depiction of collaboration was limited to “working together to promote the development of clean energy, including by facilitating business cooperation and deepening civil nuclear cooperation.” Japan’s April 11, 2014 “Strategic Energy Plan” – a plan without any targets for anything – was “welcomed,” whereas the US military’s target of 25% renewable energy by 2025 remained one unnoticed elephant among the herd in the room. Another elephant was the US military and “climate change,” which got three boilerplate mentions in the Joint Statement. There was no emphasis on US-Japan military cooperation on climate change, even though the US military itself has for years identified climate change as the mother of all threats, including fully 8 detailed references to “climate change” and its consequences in its March 4, 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR 2014)…
Compared to the IPCC, the US military is both more forthright in its assessments of climate change risk and realistic in its appraisal of the cost-cutting merits of renewable energy and efficiency. Consistent with several years of military-centred analyses, the QDR 2014 warns that the multiplicity of effects produced by climate change “will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.” The QDR 2014 also points out that the US military’s ambitious programs “to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resilience of our installations.”…
***The US military is not independently generating these analyses and cutting-edge mitigation-adaptation programs, but rather in cooperation with other federal agencies (especially the Department of Energy), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), Sandia National Laboratories, and other elements of what can legitimately be described as a green military-industrial complex…
The Abe efforts emphasize military initiatives with a surprisingly “hawkish” stress on being “battle oriented.” Yet green would seem the geopolitically safer and economically more rewarding option, as the US military’s QDR 2014/2010 and other analyses indicate…
The importance of the US-Japan green alliance initiatives transcends partisan politics. The reality in the US is that while the Obama administration talks of “all of the above” on energy, at the spearpoint of innovative deployment they are actually mobilizing the deliberately disruptive green military-industrial complex. Among a multitude of moves, their 2013 appointment of former ACORE head Dennis McGinn, an impressive exponent of renewables, to Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy and Installations, was a potent indicator of intent…
The Japanese sense of vulnerability on energy is grounded in the reality of possessing virtually no conventional resource endowments. It is now compounded by the desperation of extant vested energy interests. These actors’ political clout has impaired the country’s capacity to, as Bloomberg editor James Gibney exhorts, “make disaster the mother of invention” by using the Fukushima shock as a spur to “achieving sustainable, smart-energy self-sufficiency…
Failure to take this resource-lite road could lead the Japanese further towards the risk of conflict. Imagine for example that the Japanese follow Team Abe’s lead and lock themselves into reliance on depleting conventional resources, with or without the smidgeon of nuclear power they can realistically expect. And then ask what might happen if the Americans do not have the fracking abundance that their boosters claim to possess, a likelihood already gnawing at the banks and other players who have bet big money on the “shale revolution.”…
***As retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley, an expert on climate change, wrote in a Fox News editorial in an effort to shake some sense into the heads of denialists: “The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering. The decisions made in 1914 reflected political policies pursued for short-term gains and benefits, coupled with institutional hubris, and a failure to imagine and understand the risks or to learn from recent history.” That pretty much summarizes the irresponsibility of leaving green off the table between Obama and Abe. The risks exacerbated by re-affirming the status quo are precisely the kinds of risks that the US green military-industrial complex is aimed at. So the Obama regime and other players should think of how to push the promising arrow of an expanded green alliance into the Abe and METI bubble of complacency. And perhaps the Japanese and international media should be asking why green collaboration was not at the centre of that Abe-Obama negotiating table at this historic time, when an embryonic green alliance already exists.
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/4111
(About the Writer above: Andrew DeWit is Professor in Rikkyo University’s School of Policy Studies and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. His recent publications include “Climate Change and the Military Role in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response,” in Paul Bacon and Christopher Hobson (eds) Human Security and Japan’s Triple Disaster (Routledge, 2014), “Japan’s renewable power prospects,” in Jeff Kingston (ed)Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2013), and (with Kaneko Masaru and Iida Tetsunari) “Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11 (Routledge, 2012). He is lead researcher for a five-year (2010-2015) Japanese-Government funded project on the political economy of the Feed-in Tariff.)
31 March: Fox News: Time for real leadership on climate change, energy, national security
By David M. Slayton and David Titley (retired Navy Rear Admiral)
(David M. Slayton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Co-Chair of the Hoover Institution’s Arctic Security Initiative.
David Titley is a Professor of Practice in Meteorology at Penn State and the founding director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk.)
The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering…
Once again nations face a challenge – climate change — which, if left unmanaged, has the potential to bring tremendous pain to tens of millions of people, and disrupt seriously the existing economic, political, and security orders of the day…
We must incentivize and transform research and development into reliable and economically viable low to no carbon baseline power generation and transportation fuels; a revenue-neutral carbon tax is a great place to start…
Ubiquitous non-carbon based power and clean water can change the world in a huge way – for the better – and the U.S. can lead the way…
The U.S. Department of Defense in its recently released Quadrennial Defense Review treats climate change in a strategically coherent manner – linking its impacts with other global trends such as population change, growing affluence and globalization…
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/31/time-for-real-leadership-on-climate-change-energy-national-security/?intcmp=trending
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GREAT NEWS. Voice of Russia is basically the Reuters report below, but the headline is sharper:
16 June: Voice of Russia: UN climate talks on Sunday fail to predict future of carbon markets
The use of carbon markets to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions was dealt a blow on Sunday after two weeks of United Nations talks on designing and reforming the mechanisms ended in deadlock.
The negotiations, held as part of UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, made scant progress as envoys representing almost 200 nations tied reforms to progress under the wider discussions and remained entrenched in diverse positions.
The deadlock gives investors little sign that there will be a pickup in demand under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the UN ‘s current main carbon market which has seen activity dry up after assignment over $400 billion into emission-cutting projects in developing countries over the past decade.
It also offers no guidance on how the growing patchwork of national and regional carbon markets worldwide will fit into a future international framework to tackle climate change.
“We believe there is a future for markets … (but) to agree on something that wouldn’t be robust enough for us to engage on later on would just not make any sense,” Elina Bardram told journalists at a briefing after the talks ended on Sunday…
Poorer nations have been more wary, particularly as most CDM investment went to wealthier emerging economies such as Brazil and China and to industrial gas destruction projects, which generated healthy profits for companies but led to little sustainable development and had their environmental integrity questioned…
Framework fails
In a separate strand of the talks, governments failed to make much progress on efforts to launch a platform to help set common standards and accounting rules for reducing emissions and tie together national and regional emissions trading schemes…
Separate text listing elements of such a platform, referred to as a “Framework for Various Approaches”, was promoted by a group of richer nations including United States and Japan, which are both designing their own programs to use foreign carbon credits.
But this was removed after meeting resistance from developing nations, which first want rich governments to take on deeper emission reduction targets at home…
The EU, whose preparations towards a new global climate deal have not included additional demand for foreign carbon credits to 2030, has been criticized by investor groups for undermining its leadership role in new carbon market development…
The UN talks are scheduled to resume at the next negotiating round in December in Lima, Peru.
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_06_16/UN-climate-talks-on-Sunday-fail-to-predict-future-of-carbon-markets-9810/
16 June: Reuters: Ben Garside: U.N. climate talks fracture over future of carbon markets
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/15/us-un-carbon-idINKBN0EQ1BR20140615
read the Green SPIN:
16 June: BusinessGreen: Will Nichols: UN hails progress at latest Bonn climate talks
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/analysis/2350218/un-hails-progress-at-latest-bonn-climate-talks
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there is *plenty of material here for a new blog! Maybe called: ‘Pat’s Blog’ ?
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Come on Peter,
Pat is very useful.. Somehow he trawls the Earth’s surface for all sorts of stuff that most of us would never have a hope of finding and reading.
Sure he get a bit over-exuberant at times, but its something we should learn to live with, for the benefit he brings to the blog.
That’s my opinion, anyway. 🙂
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Okay, I’ll try to learn to live with it 🙂
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Too true Griss.
More than a couple of times Pat’s renderings has supplied me with, if not the actual stick, then the link to it and allowed me to prod a rabid CAGW miscreant. 🙂
Thanks Pat.
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I also support Pat although in the past I was critical of the sheer volume. The fact is that volume is pulled out of the news feeds by Pat, consolidated and condensed by Pat and sometimes off topic, often placed here when it is very on topic. All at what must be considerable effort for Pat
Thanks Pat
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Given that Nature conducts its own form of geo-engineering on a scale that makes the proposed mankind created geo engineering projects look like the bite of a mite on an elephant flea’s gonads then any proposed geo-engineering is likely to just like trying to prevent the non existent, supposedly human created Catastrophic Global Warming.
It will be nothing more than another immense destruction of global economic wealth and of human lives and of living standards for absolutely no minutely perceivable benefit of any sort to man, beast or climate.
A few of those known natural climate geo – engineering occurences
1 / AIRA, JAPAN SUPER VOLCANO
One of the most recently troubling calderas in the world is the 150-square-mile Aira caldera in southern Japan, on the edge of which sits the city of Kagoshima.
The biggest eruptions took place 22,000 years ago when 14 cubic miles of material burped out of the ground and formed the Aira caldera, which is now largely Kagoshima Bay. That is equal to about 50 Mount St. Helens eruptions.
2 / VALLES CALDERA, NEW MEXICO SUPER VOLCANO
There is a sleeping monster in the heart of New Mexico.
The 175-square-mile Valles caldera forms a large pock in the middle of northern New Mexico, west of Santa Fe. It last exploded 1.2 million and 1.6 million years ago, piling up 150 cubic miles of rock and blasting ash as far away as Iowa. That’s equivalent to roughly 2,000 Mount St. Helens eruptions.
Around the fractured ring of Valles caldera, lava flows from after the major eruptions built up mountains and left obsidian flows as recently as 60,000 years ago. As with other calderas, there are still signs of heat below: hot springs are still active around Valles.
Geologists suspect the cause of Valles caldera has something to do with how the western United States’ portion of the North American tectonic plate is being pulled apart. Will Valles erupt again? No one knows.
3 / LAKE TAUPO, NEW ZEALAND SUPER VOLCANO
New Zealand’s Taupo caldera has been filled by water, creating what many describe as one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes.
Lake Taupo itself was created by a massive eruption 26,500 years ago. The caldera — the collapsed and subsided basin left after the huge eruption — became today’s lake. But Taupo did not die. The 485-square-mile caldera let loose again in the year A.D. 181, with estimates of ash and magma reaching as high as 22 cubic miles. That’s on the order of a hundred times more than Mount St. Helens. Today Lake Taupo still shows signs of life, which New Zealanders have put to good use. Ample hot springs and other hydrothermal activity enable New Zealand to generate about 8 percent of its electricity at a geothermal plant on the north side of Lake Taupo, at Wairakei.
4 / LONG VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Second only to Yellowstone in North America is the Long Valley caldera, in east-central California.
The 200-square-mile caldera is just south of Mono Lake, near the Nevada state line. The biggest eruption from Long Valley was 760,000 years ago, which unleashed 2,000 to 3,000 times as much lava and ash as Mount St. Helens, after which the caldera floor dropped about a mile, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Some of the ash reached as far east as Nebraska.
5 / LAKE TOBA, SUMATRA, INDONESIA SUPER VOLCANO
The 1,080-square-mile Toba caldera is the only supervolcano in existence that can be described as Yellowstone’s “big” sister.
About 74,000 years ago, Toba erupted and ejected almost three times as much volcanic ash as the most recent major Yellowstone eruption (Lava Creek, 630,000 years ago) and about 12 percent more than Yellowstone’s largest eruption (Huckleberry Ridge, 1.8 million years ago). That comes to several thousand times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980
__________________________
So despite those Super Volcano eruptions leading to globally shaking climate affecting outcomes due to the colossal amounts of ejecta , the effect on the global climate only lasted for a decade or two and then settled again into the climate of the previous era ;
The horribly abused thing called Climate that nobody can quite put a handle except it is “abused” in some way if you believe a few percent of the more mentally warped of the global population, is still here and seems to be rolling along just the same as it has always been. Or as Alice in Wonderland would put it, it’s never too hot and never too cold so lets leave it at that.
Mankind plus a few hundreds of millions of different species from viruses to whales are still here.
There’s a few more super volcanoes around that are busting to go off again in ten minutes to ten million years.
And there are as usual, a few way out whackos who call themselves scientists who are so up themselves in their own self promoting importance that they think that THEY can control and alter the Earth’s climate at their whim because they have some unfounded belief in some far out catastrophic ideology and dogma and they can do this WITHOUT asking anybody else or the 7.2 billions of ordinary people of this planet if THEY actually want anybody interfering or trying to interfere in what are entirely natural characteristics, the weather and climate of this world we live on.
Nobody can change the climate without first changing the weather.
Changing the weather to the extent it would change the climate needs at least a century and changing the weather for a fraction of that time would mean starvation on a colossal scale as crops world wide would be destroyed and the growing patterns of trees and all plant and animal life would be disrupted and destroyed .
But I guess those so called scientists are just too bloody dumb and self centred and ignorant of the real world and real people to ever think of that.
If those same way out self indulgent arrogant wannabe climate interfering whackos want an example of how to change the entire world and it’s climate, go ask those 200 million year old species of termites how to do it.
Because they did and it took fifty or so million years to do so.
And they were just one out of the millions of species down through time who have changed the global climate in both small and large ways.
And the result was mankind.
Thats US!
And this is the world and it’s climate that we live in today and which shaped us as a species.
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There is no valid climate science, no competent climate scientists, and hence no rational governmental climate policy–even possible, much less in existence–today. All of our authoritative institutions–political, scientific, the media–are suborned, and the entire system is broken, from the top down in all areas. There is a crisis of general incompetence among scientists, across all fields, in defense of failed or failing theories and suppressive of correction by even the clearest of real-world observations.
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Hoping Jo won’t mind, but note a new thread at Climate Audit where Aussie academics have not used good statistical method, a noted problem in all global warming work, highlighted for example by the Wegman reports to US Congress.
There is adequate evidence now to imply a past educational failure in Australia’s tertiary and associated institutions, which seems (thankfully) to be mostly limited to work on global warming and therefore a smaller target to correct.
The question is, how to correct it? Why not a few letters to Minister for Environment or whatever the full title is? (Greg Hunt, MP).
It is embarrassing to see Australian poor science time after time highlighted in world circles. This country can do better with its scarce research funds.
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