By Paul Homewood
The delusional Ambrose Evans-Pritchard still believes that the world is desperate to transition to green energy.
He is worried that if we open a new coking coal mine in Cumbria, we will fall behind other countries in the race for “clean” energy, countries, I suppose, like Germany who are demolishing a windfarm in order to dig for lignite!
Perhaps we should check back through the archives to see how some of his other prognostications fared.
For instance, he wrote this article in 2015, just after the Paris Agreement:
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Whether or not you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming is irrelevant. The Chinese Academy and the Politburo do accept it. So does President Xi Jinping, who spent his Cultural Revolution carting coal in the mining region of Shaanxi. This political fact is tectonic for the global fossil industry and the economics of energy.
Until last Saturday, it was an article of faith among Western climate sceptics and some in the fossil industry that China would never sign up to the COP21 accord in Paris or accept the "ratchet" of five-year reviews.
They have since fallen back to a second argument, claiming that the deal is meaningless because China will not sacrifice coal-driven growth to please the West, and without China the accord unravels since it now emits as much CO2 as the US and Europe combined.
This political judgment was perhaps plausible three or four years ago in the dying days of the Hu Jintao era. Today it is clutching at straws.
Coal, oil and gas companies and their investors should assume that China’s leaders meant what they said in Paris, and therefore that the balance of political power in the world has swung towards drastic reductions in fossil fuel use, and that negative net CO2 emissions by 2070 is on the cards.
China invested $90bn in renewable energy last year and is already the superpower of low-carbon industries. It installed more solar in the first quarter than currently exists in France.
China installed a record 23 gigawatts (GW) of windpower in 2014.
Well, how did that go down, Ambrose?
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BP Energy Review
Since Paris, China’s emissions of CO2 have been going up faster then ever, and are now 14% higher.
The five-year review, COP26, came and went, and China still refuse to actually commit to any reductions in emissions; they even vetoed calls for the phase-out of coal power to be included in the COP26 agreement.
But surely, I hear you ask, all of this renewable energy they are investing in is soon going to displace fossil fuels. Sadly, AEP misled you!
BP Energy Review
The billions invested in wind and solar have barely made a dent in China’s overall energy mix. They still only account for 6% of total energy consumption.
I have no idea whether Xi is worried about climate change or not.
But the facts don’t lie. China know that they cannot run their economy on wind and solar power, and fossil fuels will remain the main source of energy for decades to come.
China has only one priority, and that’s economic growth.
If AEP has not worked that out yet, maybe the Telegraph should replace him with somebody less gullible.
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December 12, 2022 at 05:20AM
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