By Jo Nova

Life on Earth is about to collapse but the government may have to keep their 2035 emissions target a secret until after our next election. Shucks…

The government was supposed to release the “2035 update” by February next year. It was part of the sacred Paris Agreement that they pump up the NetZero promises every five years, which means by February 2025. But when The Australian newspaper asked if the government would keep that deadline, the spokeswoman pointedly did not say “Yes”.

When asked by The Australian if the government would stick to its February deadline, the spokeswoman said: “The Albanese government is working to bring down energy prices and emissions after a decade of delay, dysfunction and denial – but our progress is precarious.

— by Rosie Lewis, The Australian

Australia will, of course, be caught in the wake of the US Election with our election coming by May next year. It will be so much harder here to run on climate piety if Trump wins (beyond the margin of cheating). And the rise of skeptical parties in Europe is spooking campaign managers.

Suddenly climate activists don’t want climate on the agenda

In tandem, ‘o-so-conveniently, the chief climate propaganda unit simultaneously announced they might have to delay giving their “frank and fearless advice” until after the election too, proving they are not frank at all, and very afraid the voters will drive a pike through their climate balloon.

They all know the public won’t vote for the Labor Party if they reveal their extortionate plans. The only way for the blob to get what they want is to hide it. They are just copying “the Team-Kamala Plan”. (Don’t mention the Climate.) In the US, Kamala is saying nothing about the climate, and the Greens fully endorse her silence. The only way to solve that paradox is to assume deceit and trickery is part of the plan.

For the same reason, The Climate Change Authority (CCA) (the Australian propaganda unit) also realize that if they lay out the path to Net Zero by 2050 before the election, the Prime Minister will be put on the spot, and forced to deny or admit the points on the list, and they don’t want that. He might have to agree to let Australians buy the car they want, eat whatever they like, and even install gas stoves.  That won’t stop him doing those things after the election, but it will make it more embarrassing. It’s harder to win the subsequent election if the opposition can play an annoying reel of him saying  “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead” and that sort of thing. It’s so much better to lay low, then spring those horrible plans later, after a storm or a flood.

Look at the vapid excuses the Climate Change Authority make for  delaying the “advice”:

CCA chair Matt Kean, who was hand-picked by Mr Bowen [The Minister], said the release of the advice wouldn’t be “dictated by domestic political timetables”, leaving open the possibility of it coming after the federal election.

In other words, it is absolutely being dictated by domestic political timetables.

“The Climate Change Authority’s role is to provide independent, frank and fearless advice to the parliament and to the government of the day, irrespective of political colour,” Mr Kean, a former NSW Liberal treasurer, said.

“That advice needs to be informed by all of the facts and that’s why we will take our time to do the appropriate work to ensure the recommendations we make are as robust as possible.”

— by Rosie Lewis, The Australian

Never in history did they wait for “all the facts” before telling everyone what to do. Aren’t we in a desperate race to stave off extinction? Nevermind…

The only voters who want NetZero targets are the billionaires who invest in unreliable power

There are no school-girls screaming for climate action any more, just investors:

As the Climate Change Authority prepares to release a review into what actions key sectors could take to reach net zero by 2050, Investor Group on Climate Change policy managing director Erwin Jackson said businesses needed stability.

“Investors are looking for all governments to announce strong 2035 climate targets well before the COP in Brazil at the end of next year,” he said.

“Failing to act on climate change will make the job of Australian farmers, businesses, communities and investors even harder as they face more extreme weather events and an increasingly volatile future.”

When they say “businesses need stability” they really mean “businesses need subsidies”.

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Degrowth is about government authoritarianism overriding the natural human impulse to improve. Marcus Feldthus of the Copenhagen Business School needs to reeducate himself about ends and means to at least be able to inform his students about the happy side of life and living.”

No-growth (stagnation) is bad enough. In business, every promotion must be balanced by a demotion or retirement. For one person to buy more, another person must buy less. Charity not, the zero sum game is a recipe for low morale and infighting, just of the opposite of charity through abundance.

Take another step backward to a negative sum game. More losers than winners. The survival of the fittest. Glum is the word as rising expectations is replaced by despair.

Less is not more but less. Less convenience, less leisure, less security, and less philanthropy toward others. And with incentives stymied, the desperadoes look to government to intervene at the expense of others. French economist and classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote in 1848:

… it is a well-established fact that the state cannot procure satisfaction for some without adding to the labor of others…. The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

What needs “degrowth” is government, not the market, a subject for another time.

“Planetary Boundaries”

What is the latest thinking and pitch from the degrowth movement? This social media post from Marcus Feldthus, whose self-described mission is to “build a post growth business in the pursuit of sustainability,” provides an update. His website advertises an online course, “Aligning Business with Planetary Boundaries,” based on four precepts (verbatim):

1. Why green growth fails to deliver results fast enough and sufficiently.
2. How the inequality and ecological crises are connected.
3. Cases of companies that get sustainability right and wrong.
4. How to start implementing post growth thinking in a business.

He urges his students to “start a conversation about the assumptions in your company.”

No-growth, de-growth …. Ouch! Calling Julian Simon!

Feldthus continues on the environmental front (reproduced verbatim):

1. Assuming you can decouple carbon emissions from economic growth sufficiently to live up to the Paris Agreement (no evidence of that happening)
2.  Assuming some new technology will magically appear and solve point 1 (techno-optimism ignores that hope is not a strategy)
3.  Assuming climate change is the only problem (when there are 8 other planetary boundaries)
4.  Assuming stable prices on energy and materials (when energy expenditures are increasing)
5.  Assuming that increases in energy efficiencies lead to absolute energy and material reductions in a growth-based system (the money you save, you use to grow the output, to make more money, which cancels out the initial savings – also known as The Rebound Effect)
6.  Assuming that you can recycle your way out of the ecological crisis (the 2nd law of thermodynamics explains why that is not possible)
7.  Assuming that services have no, or an insignificant, ecological footprint (services cannot entirely replace the material sector)

Marcus Feldthus sees hope and momentum:

Degrowth is breaking into the mainstream. Covered by: UN, Harvard Business Review, NY Times, Ernst & Young, BBC, and Bloomberg Festival. As something to be explored, not ridiculed. Here is a quote from each 👇

Bloomberg Festival: Ted Talk by Gaya Herrington

“Our choice is not whether to keep growing or not. But whether the end of growth is coming by design or disaster. Either we choose limits or have them forced upon us.”

Harvard Business Review: In Defense of Degrowth

“The core of the degrowth argument is the historical fact that economic growth and emissions are inexorably connected (…) To be realistic about the fundamental challenges of growth, we must adjust our cultural assumptions and reconfigure unsustainable business models.”

UN Rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter: Eradicating poverty beyond growth

“The transition to a post-growth development trajectory, focused on the realization of human rights rather than on an increase in the aggregate levels of production and consumption, should be explicitly mentioned in A Pact for the Future”.

New York Times: Shrink the Economy, Save the World?

“Less than two decades ago, an economist like Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy,” was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se.” Yet today there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that — in journals, on podcasts, at conferences.”

Ernst & Young: A new economy

“Seemingly organized under many different frameworks (e.g., Doughnut Economics, Beyond GDP, ecological economics, degrowth and regenerative economics), these concepts share the common vision of an economy founded on human and planetary flourishing. We suggest they also point to five guiding principles foundational to accelerating the transition toward this goal.”

BBC: Less is more: Can Degrowth Save The World? by Alvaro Alvarez Ricciardelli

“A group of academics and activists are questioning the possibility of endless economic growth on a finite planet. They instead advocate for a bold solution: degrowth.”

And, if you want to understand what this shift means for businesses, I just launched a beginner’s guide on it. It’s called Post Growth Business 101. 📌 Get it here: https://lnkd.in/ePFW-j5a

Final Comment

Degrowth is the final solution against modernity. It is an anti-human philosophy of stagnation and decline based on the belief that there are too many people. Remember Paul Ehrlich?

Degrowth is a fringe movement within Deep Ecology. It sanctions deindustrialization and thus welcomes high energy prices and energy rationing, even blackouts.

Degrowth is about government authoritarianism overriding the natural human impulse to improve. It lurks in high places and must be exposed for what it is. Marcus Feldthus of the Copenhagen Business School needs to reeducate himself about ends and means to at least be able to inform his students about the happy side of life and living.

Studies are marvellous things. Almost seven years ago a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience led to this striking Guardian headline: “Global warming will weaken wind power, study predicts”. The abstract of the study was a little more nuanced, concluding that climate change and a warming planet would result in “decreases in wind power across the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes and increases across the tropics and Southern Hemisphere, with substantial regional variations.”

The Guardian was concerned (but not sufficiently so to stop campaigning for more windfarms):

The research is the first global study to project the impact of temperature rises on wind energy and found big changes by the end of the century in many of the places hosting large numbers of turbines.

Wind farms have grown more than fivefold in the last decade and plunging costs have made them a key way of reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning. But in the central US, for example, the power of the wind could fall by nearly a fifth…

…It does mean such changes need to be taken into account in planning future wind farms, he said, and also in assessing how much wind farms overall can cut global emissions.

Ironically, perhaps:

The biggest fall was in Japan, where wind farm building is just beginning to accelerate, with wind energy projected to fall by 58kW, or about 10%. The central US was second with 49kW but because the average current winds are generally weaker than in Japan, this represents a larger 17% drop. The UK is anticipated to fall by 36kW, or 5%.

Fast forward almost seven years and – phew! – we have a new and exciting headline: “Global heating could raise potential for offshore wind power, study says”; and an even more exciting sub-heading: “Heating of 4C could increase potential offshore wind energy by average of 9% by end of century, research suggests”.

This time the research (titled “Increases of Offshore Wind Potential in a Warming World”) is published in Geophysical Research Letters, here. The “Plain language summary” is music to the ears of wind farm developers:

Wind energy is key to achieving global carbon neutrality. While onshore wind has been extensively studied, offshore wind energy (OWE) projections have received less attention. Climate models, particularly those from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 5 and 6 (CMIP5/6), have underestimated changes in OWE in past decades. Our study addresses this by using a state-of-the-art reanalysis, ERA5, to correct these underestimations in CMIP6 models and project future changes in offshore wind power density (WPD) in a warming world. We discover that global offshore WPD is expected to rise throughout the 21st century. By the end of the century, we project an increase in offshore WPD by 3.8%–18.3% under various emission scenarios. Specifically, with global warming of 4°C (and 2°C), we expect increases of 8.9%–9.2% (and 0.2%–2.2%) compared to that at a 1.5°C warming level. Europe stands out under 4°C global warming, with the largest projected increase in offshore WPD (26%). This …highlights the growing importance of offshore wind in our energy mix and underscores the need for improved modeling to guide investments and policies.

Isn’t that great? In less than seven years Europe and North America go from being net losers to big winners:

Overall, in regions with the higher current installations, the most substantial increase in offshore WPD is expected in Europe as global warming intensifies, although noteworthy increases are also evident in NA.

By happy coincidence, this is where so many new wind farms are planned. Happily too:

…Notably, the regions covering the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Bay of Bengal, which exhibited decreasing trends, are projected to accelerate…

As so often seems to be the case, however:

More research is needed to understand the impact of extreme wind events and to map the changes in wind energy at a higher resolution.

Send more money – we’re getting there! And isn’t it wonderful that the science is so settled.