From Robert Bryce’s Substack

Another wind drought has led to soaring electricity prices across Europe. Norway, which exports power to its European neighbors, has seen enough.

Robert Bryce

For the second time in a month, Germany’s electric grid has been hit by a wind drought, known in German as a Dunkelflaute. The lack of wind sent Europe’s electricity prices soaring to their highest levels since the end of 2022, when Europe was in the midst of an energy crisis due to concerns about supplies of Russian gas. That’s saying something since Europe — and Germany in particular — now appears to be amid a permanent energy crisis.

Yesterday, German consumers paid an average of $400 per megawatt-hour for electricity. During peak times, prices in Germany’s wholesale power market came close to $1,000 per MWh, the highest level in 18 years. Here’s how a reporter with Spain’s El Pais newspaper explained the situation:

Dunkelflaute is a cursed word in the German electricity sector. The combination, typical of cold anticyclones, of low temperatures (which increase demand) and the almost total absence of wind (which hinders wind generation) configures one of the worst possible scenarios for the price of electricity: it forces the burning of more gas in combined cycle plants, which are much more expensive, and that substantially increases the bill…The main factor behind this escalation is the lack of wind. While at this time of year Germany’s powerful wind power sector (onshore and offshore) usually averages almost 20 gigawatts (GW) of power, according to data from the specialist portal Montel, thus becoming the country’s main source of electricity, on Wednesday it will just exceed 3 GW. With the cloudy skies, solar photovoltaic power is also operating well below its potential and forces combined cycle plants — in which gas is burned to obtain electricity — to operate at a higher rate than usual, driving up prices.

The wind drought isn’t just hitting Germany. As shown in the graphic at the top of this article, electricity prices across Europe soared amid the wind drought. In response, Norwegian politicians are promising to dismantle the undersea power cables that connect Norway’s grid to mainland Europe to protect Norwegians from Europe’s tumultuous electricity market. Electricity prices in Norway, which gets 90% of its power from hydro, hit record prices this week despite having full hydro reservoirs.

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According to the X account of Visegrád 24, a Norwegian news outlet, the two links that connect Norway to Europe will reach their technical lifetimes in 2026 and 2027. The two cables have 9 GW of exchange capacity, of which 5.1 GW connects to Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK. The outlet quoted Norway’s energy minister as saying, “It’s a shitty situation.”

Visegrád 24 also quoted Sweden’s deputy prime minister and energy minister, Ebba Busch, as being “furious with the Germans.” The article continued, explaining that due to Germany’s decision to shutter its nuclear plants, “people in southern Sweden and southern Norway now have [to] pay $5 for a 10-minute shower.”

As seen above, Germany’s wind energy production collapsed three times this week. During each wind lull, the shortfall was made up by gas-fired generation. As I explained last month, during the first Dunkelflaute of the year:

The latest wind drought provides more evidence of the foolishness of Germany’s Energiewende, an insanely expensive effort designed to force the country off of hydrocarbons and onto alt-energy. In September, a study published in the International Journal of Sustainable Energy estimated that between 2002 and 2022, the Energiewende cost Germany $746 billion. Of that sum, more than half was spent on alt-energy production and distribution. The remainder was spent on subsidies. If Germany had spent about half that sum on nuclear energy, it would have achieved greater emissions reductions than it did by chasing the mirage of alt-energy.

Things may be bad, but don’t ever underestimate Germany’s ability to make things even worse.

As I wrote in “Germany Is Dunkelf**ked,” the German government plans to provide an additional $17 billion in subsidies for Germany’s wind sector. Those new payments will be added to existing alt-energy subsidies, which the University of Cologne estimates will cost $19.3 billion in 2025.

Furthermore, on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the German government has “dropped plans for a major expansion of gas-fired power plants because of an absence of political support.” The country was aiming to add 5 GW of new capacity in 2025 and another 5 GW by 2028, but the deal couldn’t move forward due to last month’s collapse of the coalition government.

A final note: This morning, I talked to a US energy industry veteran who is currently in Berlin attending an energy conference. I asked about the sentiment in Germany amid the Dunkelflaute. The veteran told me it was so cold in Berlin that he bought an extra hat to stay warm. “It’s super cold, and there’s no wind and no sun.” As for the sentiment at the energy conference, he told me, “German industry is fleeing.”

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Media hits

I was recently on the Americano podcast with The Spectator’s Freddy Gray. We talked at length about Chris Wright, energy humanism, and US energy policy. You can listen to that podcast here.

A few days ago, I was on Australia’s ADH TV talking to my friend Gerard Holland about the recent US election and what might happen under the Trump administration. You can watch that episode here.

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turns a quarter-century old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP27’s recent failure making COP28’s prospects look grim.

Palmisano’s memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded. The story of Enron as the darling of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.

The Washington Post broke the memo soon after Enron’s demise, showing how Enron was hardly a free-market, capitalistic company in  “[Enron] chairman Pushed Firm’s Agenda With Clinton White House.” Indeed, Enron was “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business,” as told by Jeremy Leggett in The Carbon War (Penguin: 1999), p. 204.

The Kyoto Protocol is far past its expiration date of 2008–2012 (see here and here). But Palmisano’s memo, a classic in the history of political capitalism, lives on.

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To: Terry Thorn, Joe Hillings, Cynthia Sandherr, Jeff Keeler, Fiona Grant, Hap Boyd, Bill Shoff, Dan Badger, Tom Kearney, Lynda Clemmons, Bruce Stram, Mike Terraso, Rob Bradley, Jim O’Neill, John Hardy

From: John Palmisano

Date: December 12, 1997

Subject: Implications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto & What Transpired

This memo summarizes the implications of the agreement reached in Kyoto and also describes what I was doing and provides some observations.

Implications

If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous. In addition, a carbon emissions trading system will be developed. While the trading system will be implemented by 2008, I am sure that reductions will begin to trade with 1-2 years. Finally, Enron has immediate business opportunities which derive directly from this agreement.

On the policy-front: There will be a great number of country-specific and international meetings related to every aspect of this agreement. I do not think it is possible to overestimate the importance of this year in shaping every aspect of the agreement.

Three issues of specific importance to Enron are: (1) the rules governing emissions trading, (2) the rules governing joint implementation within Annex-1, and (3) the rules governing the proposed clean energy fund (which promises to dwarf the GEF as a fund for wind, solar, and power plant conversions.)

On the business front: During the next year there will be intense positioning of organizations to capture an early lead in a variety of carbon trading businesses.

The endorsement of joint implementation within Annex-1 is exactly what I have been lobbying for and it seems like we won.

The clean development will be a mechanism for funding renewable projects. Again, we won. (We need to push for natural gas firing to be included among the technologies that get preferential treatment from the fund.)

The endorsement of emissions trading was another victory for us.

Highlights of the Agreement

38 developed countries are required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to or below 1990 levels by 2012.

The U.S. reduction objective is 7%, the European Union is 8%, and Japan is 6%; therefore, it is not possible (or at least credible) that Congress can say the United States is at a comparative disadvantage vis-à-vis its main trading partners or competitors since the EU and Japan have higher control targets and are more “carbon-lean” than are we.

Six gases are included (CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6).

Emissions trading is included. Details of an international system are to be worked out in 1998.

A “clean development fund” is included. The fund would allow for emission offsets from projects in developing countries.

Joint implementation for Annex-1, developed countries and the transitional economies, is included. This means that Enron projects in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania or other eastern countries can be monetized, in part, by capturing carbon reductions for sale back in the US or other Western countries.

While I do not have the final version of the agreement, I do have the first and second versions. The latest version is not on the world-wide web.

What I Was Involved In

I gave three speeches and received an award on behalf of Enron. The speeches dealt with emissions trading, energy efficiency/renewable, and the role of business in promoting clean energy outcomes. The award came from the Climate Institute and was for Ken Lay and Enron for our work promoting clean-energy solutions to climate change. The other recipients were Sven Auken, MP and Minister for Energy and Environment in Denmark, and MP and former Environment Minister for the UK, John Gummer.

I have met Gummer and Auken several times before and it was nice for them to hear Enron praised so much. (I gave a speech with Gummer last Saturday and it was the third time we have been on the podium together. He is someone who still retains considerable influence in the UK and Europe and someone Enron might want to cultivate.)

I was also involved in a press conference.

Observations

I believe that it will be impossible to separate electricity restructuring from climate change as a domestic political issue. The administration has signaled its view that the two issues are intertwined.

At yesterday’s White House press conference, this connection was underlined by the comments from Tom Kasten, President of Trigen Corporation who spoke in favor of the climate change agreement and its linkage to restructuring. His remarks had to be cleared by the White House.

These remarks are entirely consistent with every other signal from the Administration’s climate change team.

Through our involvement with the climate change initiatives, Enron now has excellent credentials with many “green” interests including Greenpeace, WWF, NRDC, GermanWatch, the US Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI, and Worldwatch. This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monetized).

(Parenthetically, I heard many times people refer to Enron in glowing terms. Such praise went like this: “Other companies should be like Enron, seeking out 21^st century business opportunities” or “Progressive companies like Enron are….” Or “Proof of the viability of market-based energy and environmental programs is Enron’s success in power and SO2 trading.”)

Developing countries have acquired substantial negotiating power. The shift in negotiating power to India, Brazil, China, and the G-77 has been gradual and pronounced.

The EU negotiated as a group. Until two years ago, they negotiated as individual countries. While there are still individual country interests, the EU retains substantial power when working together. It was this cohesiveness that lead to a more stringent agreement.

EU delegates asked for my input into the agreement to oppose some of the positions espoused by some US delegates. In particular, the US was advocating no rules governing the trading of carbon emissions because rules would “inhibit trading.” My position is that rules defining who owns what reductions, how reductions are traded, how they are tracked, and liability rules will help promote trading since rules give both buyers and sellers more confidence in the commodity.

While some companies and trade associations continue to criticize developing countries for not doing more, no company wants to be specific on this issue. To the extent any company does, they will hide under the shield of a trade association. I think that shield will soon be pierced. I believe that some companies will soon break from the line that developing countries should do more. It is a weak position in terms of equity and suicidal in terms of their commercial interests in these countries.

An increasingly ugly trend has become evident to the environmental NGO community and the delegates from developing countries. They see the argument about developing country participation as a thinly disguised recycling of the early twentieth century fear-mongering characterized by the so-called “yellow-peril” or invasion of the US by Asian peoples.

The developing country delegates see the argument of the carbon lobby that the US will lose markets to developing countries as empty and racist—they see energy-intensive imports to the US coming from Japan and Germany in terms of automobiles (and these are high cost energy areas), while economic growth in developing countries is fueled by local growth or Western industries requiring low cost of labor, low cost for land, or permitting flexibility for new plants.

Enron should not participate in any argument like this because it hurts our credibility with developing countries, NGOs, and developed country governments.

I should have a copy of the agreement today.

The next year will be very intensive because the structure of the agreement exists, business opportunities are being defined, the rules governing emissions trading will be developed, and identifying, financing, and managing JI projects will be important.

One final point, Terry, if you remember, I predicted an agreement that would yield a 5% reduction by 2010; we got 7% by 2012. I now predict ratification within 3 years. I predict business opportunities within 18 months. I predict this agreement will have very significant influences on the energy sector within OECD and transitional economies and will accelerate renewable markets in developing countries.

This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!

From THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE

By H. Sterling Burnett

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IN THIS ISSUE:

• Farm Groups Fear Losing Climate Subsidies, Not Climate Change Itself
• Oceans Remove More Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Believed
• BRICS Nations Announce Support for Continued Fossil-Fuel Use

Farm Groups Fear Losing Climate Subsidies, Not Climate Change Itself

The Heartland Institute has worked since its inception to reform the nation’s agriculture laws and regulations, freeing farmers from onerous, unnecessary regulations and higher costs imposed by federal and state governments. Simultaneously, Heartland has supported efforts to wean farmers from the welfare created by farm subsidies in the form of subsidized crop insurance, payments for low prices for choosing the wrong crop in a particular year, payments for leaving ground fallow, and subsidies to create biofuels, among myriad other support payments for farmers.

The evidence is that most of this support doesn’t even go to the small family farmers that ag-state legislators talk about every time the farm bills are up for renewal. The vast majority of federal farm money goes to politically connected, wealthy, corporate farms.

Allies at The Heritage Foundation have been working to reform agricultural policies for decades, most recently outlining comprehensive reform in the “Department of Agriculture” chapter of its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document. I largely support the analysis and recommendations contained therein.

As part of its “all of government” approach to fighting climate change, the Biden administration instigated a whole new slew of farm subsidies, some of which undercut efforts to increase production and secure the food supply. The re-election of Donald Trump as president has climate alarmists and the farmers and farm groups running scared. After all, Trump has regularly referred to climate change as a hoax and vowed to cut unnecessary government spending and unjustified power, so it is fair to believe the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (DOA) climate programs are in the crosshairs for swift elimination.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which reposted an article by Inside Climate News, certainly seems to think so. The article falsely claims American farmers have suffered from climate change for eight years and, as a result, have become less skeptical that the world is in the midst of a climate crisis. Some farmers and farm lobbying groups may be displaying less skepticism toward claims that climate change is making it harder to farm, but if so, that’s not because the climate change has made it harder to plant, tend, produce, harvest, or put food on the nation’s grocery store shelves and peoples’ dinner tables, or that weather disasters are increasing amid climate change. If farmers and the lobbying organizations appear less skeptical about dangerous climate change than they have been in the past, it is likely due to the huge federal subsidies that have flowed to farms from the federal government in its futile effort to control the weather.

In the article, titled “US farms are being battered by climate change. Trump wants to put a climate denier in charge of the USDA,” Georgina Gustin of Inside Climate News warns that President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the DOA, climate skeptic Brooke Rollins, may reduce federal largesse for agricultural climate programs—money that farmers have come to enjoy and expect.

Rollins has both a law degree and a degree in agricultural development, and she served as director of the Domestic Policy Council during Trump’s first term, so she is well qualified to run the DOA. Rollins knows both the challenges facing farmers and the ins and outs of the regulations and laws governing agriculture policy.

Rather than being an unknown as Inside Climate News implies, Rollins’ views on climate change and climate policy are well known. She has spoken at The Heartland Institute’s America First Energy Conference and is on record as supporting withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and ending the Obama administration’s disastrous Clean Power Plan.

In fact, as Rollins is well aware, data and research presented at both Climate Realism and Climate at a Glance clearly demonstrate weather hasn’t become more extreme, so farmers haven’t faced worsening growing and harvesting conditions over the past eight years, or the past 30 for that matter, contrary to false media reports.

During the past 30-year period over which climate change is measured, from 1993 to 2022 (the last year with available data), the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports America’s dairy farmers have seen their production increase by more than 50 percent, with the most recent record production occurring in 2022 (see figure below).

Over the same period, cattle ranchers have seen a 23 percent increase in production, setting new records for production each year since 2018 (see figure below).

The FAO also reports U.S. crop production has done well over the past 30 years. Cereals, fruits, roots and tubers, and vegetables have all experienced production exceeding almost every year’s output prior to Trump’s first presidential term, refuting the impression of farmers struggling over the past eight years given in Inside Climate News’ story.

Changing weather patterns or lost production are not what is worrying farmers; it’s Rollins’ support for Trump’s goal of cutting government waste, particularly costly, nonsensical, and futile climate spending, that has Inside Climate News and farm lobbyists in a tizzy. Under the Biden/Harris administration, harvesting climate subsidies became a lucrative sideline for many farmers, as Inside Climate News acknowledges:

In the eight years since the last Trump administration began, American farms have been repeatedly battered by extreme weather, requiring the USDA to direct tens of billions of dollars in disaster relief and crop insurance payouts to the country’s farmers.

“Many more farmers have had their eyes opened to the threat of climate change,” Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Inside Climate News. “Many more farmers have benefited from these giant investments in farming and conservation, and have gotten some incentives and support to shift their practices. That may be harder than people think to wind back.”

Also during those years, the most powerful agricultural lobby group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, shifted its position on climate change, influencing conversations in farm country. The group had long denied the scientific consensus that human activity is driving greenhouse gas emissions, but has since softened its denial as funding for climate-focused programs has flowed to farmers and as carbon markets, based on carbon storing-farming practices, have promised the potential of revenue to its members [emphasis in original].

Inside Climate News calculated farmers have received roughly $23 billion in federal climate change support across multiple farm programs under Biden and Harris. This massive federal funding provides a powerful incentive for farm groups and the organizations that lobby on their behalf to eschew climate skepticism and embrace alarm and all the money that has come from jumping on the “climate change causes everything bad” bandwagon.

In the end, the weather is not getting worse, and agricultural production is doing fine. Farming has always been a precarious profession, beset by the seasonal and annual vagaries of weather. There is no evidence climate change is making farming harder than it has always been. The climate gravy train is coming to an end as the incoming Trump administration has promised to cut government waste. Based on the evidence, climate subsidies for farmers are unjustified and a good starting point for cuts.

Source: Climate Realism; Climate Depot; Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; The Heritage Foundation

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Oceans Remove More Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Believed

Recent research published in the journal Nature finds oceans remove more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than previously believed, necessitating a rethink of the Earth’s carbon budget and assumptions built into climate models about how the oceans and the atmosphere interact.

In this study, an international team of 15 scientists from universities and research institutes in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands examined the temperature gradients at different depths of the ocean, studying the fluxes of carbon dioxide moving through and remaining in different gradients.

Their laboratory experiments and observations showed temperatures are “highly sensitive” to the air–sea CO2 fluxes. Transecting the Atlantic Ocean repeatedly in 2018 and 2019 to collect data, they found “accounting for vertical temperature gradients reduces the difference between direct and indirect fluxes by half suggesting the Atlantic’s carbon sink is much greater than previously believed.” As a result, they conclude, “Accounting for this increased ocean uptake will probably require some revision to how global carbon budgets are quantified.”

Always remember: models’ outputs are only as good as the quality of their inputs and the assumptions built into them. The findings of this research, if accurate, are a big factor present-generation climate models fail to account for properly.

Source: Nature

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BRICS Nations Announce Support for Continued Fossil-Fuel Use

The annual summit of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and recent new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates—met in Kazan, Russia from October 22 through 24, just a couple of weeks before the COP 29 gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan.

While the BRICS meeting didn’t get the headlines COP 29 received, in many ways the agreements forged there were more important than those made in Baku. BRICS participants, representing some of the largest energy producers and users and largest greenhouse gas emitters, made it clear that commitments to fight climate change came a distant second to increasing economic development, in large part through a more intensive use of fossil fuels.

“The Kazan declaration agreed to by BRICS countries … openly declared that their domestic energy needs and economic wellbeing will take precedence over international climate agreements like the Paris Accords and ‘net zero’ initiatives,” notes CO2 Science analyst Vijay Jayaraj in an article behind a paywall at BizPac Review.

Jayaraj writes that although the governments attending BRICS said they were committed to sustainable development and fighting climate change, that appeared to be window dressing for the real message in the declaration. I quote Jayaraj at length:

A superficial glance at the Kazan agreement would lead one to believe that the BRICS consortium stands with the global climate movement and committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the energy and transportation sectors.

For instance, there are laudatory words about the Paris agreement, noting a “critical need for active climate adaptation projects.”

However, a closer look reveals that these nations—many of them still early in their development as modern societies—are in no mood to compromise on their national energy security and the use of fossil fuels.

At the heart of the declaration lies a fundamental truth that the Western climate industrial complex often refuses to recognize: Access to affordable and reliable energy and economic development cannot be sacrificed at the altar of “decarbonization” if people are to thrive.

The Kazan declaration’s emphasis on “technological neutrality” is particularly telling. By explicitly endorsing the use of “all available fuels, energy sources and technologies,” including fossil fuels with abatement technologies, BRICS nations have effectively rejected the notion of a rapid phase-out of conventional energy sources.

The declaration says that “energy security, access and energy transitions are important and need to be balanced …” In other words—in a style similar to that of the original Nationally Determined Contribution documents of India in 2017—domestic energy needs will be prioritized ahead of emission reductions.

It also calls for an uninterrupted energy supply chain, underscoring the importance of affordable energy—something that only fossil fuels can provide to countries with high poverty rates.

The declaration notes the “necessity for resilient global supply chains and stable, predictable energy demand in order to provide universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy sources as well as to ensure national, global and regional energy security.”

Directly challenging the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the Kazan statement labels such levies as “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist measures.” This is a rejection of the E.U.’s attempt to export its climate policies through trade. …

The BRICS leaders emphasize that their immediate goals—poverty eradication, infrastructure development, and economic expansion—require a secure and stable energy supply.

If China, India, Russia, and other countries representing 45 percent of the global population are all-in on fossil fuels, it’s fair to ask what hope the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The short answer is none. This means that if human fossil fuel use is causing dangerous climate change (a belief that I reject), world leaders better plan on improving their infrastructure and adapting to the changing world.

Sources: Government of India; CO2 Science

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Recommended Sites

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.