By Jo Nova
The great global carbon back-down continues:
The EU wants to keep their target while exploring every possible option not to keep it.
They’re contemplating a “non linear” path, meaning, a much slower approach now, while they think up excuses to bail out later.
Politico, [Formerly paid by USAID]
The European Commission wants to keep a 90 percent emissions-cutting target but to change how countries calculate their progress.
To start, officials are contemplating a “nonlinear” path between the EU’s 2030 emissions-cutting target of 55 percent and its 2040 goal — rather than a straight line. That could mean slower emission cuts to start, compensated by rapid declines later in the 2030s. It would also mean more pollution in total over the decade.
But as well as the delayed plan, there is the cheap foreign escape clause, the forestry option and domestic swap games.
Now that everyone knows renewables are no good, and EVs won’t replace fuel cars, there are no end of creative accounting techniques to “meet targets” without spending much or admitting defeat.
The EU might return to letting European countries buy cheap international carbon credits. This means they could fob off the “carbon reduction” to dinky schemes in the third world and save billions of dollars. This was allowed until 2020 when the EU went pious and decided that they were all for globalization unless it was a CO2 molecule. They had to come up with some reason to stop the cheap foreign schemes, otherwise the expensive carbon credits produced by wind and solar power in the EU would be worthless. Consider that in Australia in 2014, Tony Abbott’s direct auction plan showed came in at an obscene $5310 a ton. It was never about reducing CO2.
For the same reason the EU excluded nuclear power everywhere and all the time, which made no sense in atmospheric chemistry unless we view carbon-credits as a money laundering scheme to feed pet wind and solar corporations or as a way for foreign adversaries to destroy our domestic manufacturing.
In a blasphemy, the EU might even consider allowing forests to count as carbon sinks. The GreensTM might be saving the planet, they didn’t want people to plant trees instead of wind “farms”.
Finally, the EU is considering allowing domestic swapping of carbon credits between sectors. If your country is good for agriculture but bad for transport, they might just call a CO2 molecule a CO2 molecule, which is it and always was. It’s just another shuffling of the accounting columns, and a loosening of the rules. Remember the game here is not to be scientifically meaningful, but to use jargon to justify whatever octopus-rules the government thinks it can get away with.
One day, if they really need to turn down the carbon trading spigot, they’ll include lakes and oceans too, then miraculously all the big emitters will finally be carbon neutral, and everyone can say the Paris Agreement saved the world.
In any case, the Trump deflation of the global carbon bubble continues:
“What’s happened with the U.S. monkeying around now is that all the air is gone out of the tires in terms of having people have ambitious NDCs,” [said a United Kingdom official who was not authorized to speak on the record, likewise granted anonymity.] “India’s not going to push it. Neither Saudi Arabia. And then the NDC dates for delivery are going back in time, in large part because the EU is going to be late.”
— Politico
At this rate, if the Australian Labor Party wins the next election on May 3rd, the only two countries in the world still sticking to suicidal fantasy carbon targets will be the UK and Australia. Unless Canada votes for Mark Carney on April 28th. Then there will be “three”. Lord help us all.
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via JoNova
March 31, 2025 at 01:59PM
