By Paul Homewood

 

 

Have not the CCC done enough damage to this country already?

 

 

LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuters) – Britain’s climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), has recommended in a letter to government that it should commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 81% by 2035 in its upcoming budget next month.

The new Labour government is expected to announce increases in public spending and taxes in its first budget in 14 years next week.

The emissions cut target recommended by the advisers is higher than the current target of a 78% reduction by 2035 compared with 1990 levels and excludes international aviation and shipping emissions.

However, it would make a credible contribution towards limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the committee said.

"With climate damages already felt around the world, targeting an 81% emissions reduction by 2035 sets the right level of ambition," said Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee. "Our analysis shows this can be achieved in a way that benefits jobs and the economy, provided we hit the country’s 2030 target – set in line with the CCC’s advice in 2020," he said.

The government needs to set out an updated climate plan and targets for 2035 before a U.N. deadline of February 2025.

In July this year, the CCC said Britain might miss its 2030 emissions reduction target and was off track to meet a longer-term target of net zero emissions by mid-century.

The advice will also form part of the committee’s seventh carbon budget plan covering the years 2038-2042 which is due to be published in February next year.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/britains-climate-advisers-urge-steeper-emissions-cut-target-2035-2024-10-25/

Emissions of CO2 in 1990 were 604 Mt, dropping to 310 Mt last year. A target reduction of 81% by 2035 would mean a cut to 115 Mt, or 63% from now.

The actual outlook is probably even worse, because the 81% refers to all GHGs, in particular methane and N2O. Non CO2 GHGs have already been cut by59% since 1990, and further reductions will be much more difficult to achieve. If no further cuts are made in them, all of the burden will fall on CO2, implying a cut of 78% from now.

Even if power is fully decarbonised, this would only save 10% of emissions. Electric cars will no doubt help to reduce the 32% which Road Transport contributes. But maybe half the cars on the road will still be petrol/diesel, as heavy transport will be too. So there is limited room for reductions there, maybe another 10% or so.

And that’s about it!

There appears to be no hope of any mass rollout of heat pumps, and even if industry can be converted to hydrogen, the infrastructure for producing and supplying it simply won’t exist on these time scales.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-and-emissions-projections-2022-to-2040

It is worth reminding ourselves that the CCC’s Chair, Piers Forster, who has called for this has no knowledge of how the energy system or the economy. He is an academic whose background is climate modelling. Only somebody like him could come with inane comments like:

“it would make a credible contribution towards limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”.

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https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/see/staff/1267/professor-piers-forster

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If we have to have a CCC, which the law demands, we should fill it with people who understand how energy systems work, how industry operates and who are prepared to be honest about what is practical and what is not. Above all, people who will lay out the costs involved and the massive damage likely to be caused to the UK economy in order to hit the targets laid down.

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October 26, 2024 at 04:09AM

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October 26, 2024 at 04:05AM

We have seven or eight federal agencies with some sort of jurisdiction over water, plus state and local agencies, each of which has its own agenda.

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October 26, 2024 at 04:00AM

This debate was moved by Lord Lilley:  "That this House takes note of the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity." 

This gets to the heart of what our government should be about. Looking at the effect of their policy on the British people.

There are several realists among the many alarmist speakers. Here is an excellent contribution by Lord Strathcarron:

"The main impact of the Government’s climate agenda is to import pollution and to export jobs, growth and prosperity, and the two are directly linked.

Turning first to importing pollution, since 1990 our share of CO2 emissions embedded in imports has risen from just over 10% to nearly 50%. The very fact that we import half our emissions should give us pause for thought, but, unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction. The decision to cease all new oil and gas licences can only mean that, in future, we will need to import even more oil and gas to make up for our own self-induced shortfalls.

Whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even the Government’s own assessment suggests that, by 2040, the demand for natural gas will decrease by only 4%. This simply means that any domestic reduction in emissions will be made possible only by offshoring the production, and of course the jobs, to other countries. Furthermore, the imported fuels will need to be liquefied—itself a polluting process, alongside the emissions caused by shipping them here—and then there is further pollution from processing them after they have landed here.

While Ministers may be able to stand up at international conferences and proudly proclaim that our domestic emissions have reduced, these same policies have in fact only contributed to increasing global emissions. One might say that, as we produce only 1% of the world’s emissions, it does not really matter and that the gesture is more important than the reality. However, it is a mighty counterproductive gesture with a direct, negative impact on our standard of living and quality of life.

Turning to jobs, growth and prosperity, as has been well publicised, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, which is directly caused by artificially penalising industrial and domestic consumers with subsidies for renewable energy, carbon pricing and the extra infrastructure costs as a direct result of the policy. The OBR suggests that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to our bills for this year alone—and it will only get worse as we factor in future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion grid upgrade needed for decarbonisation.

To give an indication of the wishful thinking by net-zero advocates, in 2014 the current Secretary of State for Energy promised 1 million new green jobs. The outcome is somewhat less impressive. Since then, official government data shows an increase in employment in the low-carbon sector of just 40,000. Against this must be offset the manufacturing jobs we have already lost in other sectors. Moreover, there will surely be many more to come, not least in the steel and oil and gas sectors. We now have the worst of all worlds: high taxes to pay for job losses.

The other great beneficiary of all this wishful thinking is China. It is now the world leader in two seemingly contradictory energy policies: green energy, by securing the global supply and demand lines for lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind farm components; and brown energy, by building the equivalent of two coal-powered power stations a week. However, the Chinese famously take much a longer-term view of events than we do. They would agree that, due to recent advances in paleoclimate science, we know that over the last 400 million years the earth’s climate has been changing constantly and often dramatically. Relatively speaking, we are now in one of its cooler periods—the late Cenozoic ice age—meaning that we are at the tail-end of a 50-million-year cooling period.

On our own continent, even very recently we can see climate change in action. In Roman times, it was far warmer than it is now, followed by a brutal cold period in the Dark Ages. Then came the medieval warm period, when vines were growing even in Scotland. That was followed most recently by an especially cold period called the “little ice age”, the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. The statement we heard today that 2023 was the hottest year on record is quite simply not true—far from it.

This long-term view of the earth’s climate changes puts the whole net-zero delusion into a much greater perspective. It suggests that we are taxing and bankrupting ourselves domestically for absolutely minimal global benefit, if any. This whole worldview of climate change should be the subject of another debate, and a very fruitful one it would be too."

 Climate Agenda – Hansard – UK Parliament

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October 26, 2024 at 01:37AM