Germany is once again the “sick man of Europe,” according to Hans-Werner Sinn, president emeritus at the Ifo institute, and the challenges that poses, particularly in terms of the country’s energy strategy, could serve to benefit increasingly popular right-wing parties.
The “sick man of Europe” moniker has resurfaced in recent weeks as manufacturing output continues to stutter in the region’s largest economy and the country grapples with high energy prices. The label was originally used to describe the German economy in 1998 as it navigated the costly challenges of a post-reunification economy.
“It is not a short-term phenomenon,” Sinn told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy on Friday.[…]
But there are growing signs of public disenchantment in the shift to a more sustainable Europe, with a so-called “greenlash” emerging as people feel the cost impacts.
Sinn suggested there would be political ramifications as a result of the focus on sustainability.
“There is a backlash clearly … The population is now moving to the right,” Sinn said, referring to the popularity of the right-leaning Alternative for Germany party, which won a district council election for the first time in June.
“I am not moving to evaluate anything here, but … the policies which were, for ideological reasons, completely overdrawn … Pragmatism is a little bit missing in current policy,” he added.
Y2Kyoto: Carbon Credit Fraud
But I repeat myself;
A number of major carbon traders are finding that offsets they bought may now be valueless.
Trafigura Group, the world’s largest trader of carbon removal credits, has suspended a consignment as it awaits the results of an investigation into the forestry project behind the units. The situation has led the company to replace the offsets in a contract with a corporate client and instead keep the stranded credits on its own books.
Hannah Hauman, global head of carbon trading at Trafigura and a former oil trader, says the complete loss of value seen in some corners of the voluntary carbon market is unlike anything she’s witnessed in oil markets.[…]
Since the first carbon credit was traded roughly 35 years ago, the market has been hit by a steady stream of scandals that have led to wild price swings and even collapsing valuations. That has implications not just for firms trading such credits, but also for companies that use them to underpin green claims to customers and regulators.
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
So it’s goodbye, manufacturing. No more German automobiles, among other products. Of course, the issue isn’t whether the government should subsidize energy prices on behalf of the manufacturing sector. The issue is whether the government should continue to intentionally and catastrophically drive energy prices higher.
Y2Kyoto: The Science Police
This post is inspired by the successful efforts last week of climate activists — including three widely-cited scientists — to enforce misinformation by the legacy media. In a nutshell, ABC News wrote an accurate story about how climate was not a major or even significant factor in the Lahaina, Maui fire and disaster. After being mobbed by the enforcers, the story was changed to emphasize the role of climate. These sort of activist scientists who seek to enforce preferred public narratives have been called the “science police.”
Today’s post pushes back against this narrative enforcement with some actual science. Have a look at the panel below. It shows three versions of a climate time series for annual counts of North Atlantic major hurricanes from 1995 to 2050. Two of the graphs include a large change in climate, one of them does not.
Y2Kyoto: Screw The Whales
The poster fish of the environmental movement have outlived their usefulness.
Wind energy companies and their foundations have donated nearly $4.7 million to at least three dozen donations to major environmental organizations. Linowes has made public a report and a database documenting the conflicts-of-interest she discovered. — The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a granting organization, took up to $1 million from wind energy companies Avangrid and Shell, and then distributed it to other environmental groups. In August 2020, the National Audubon Society received a $200,000 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. — The same year, the Nature Conservancy received a $165,218 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. The Nature Conservancy has supported offshore wind since at least 2021. — NJ Audubon has partnered with wind farm developer Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between Shell Oil and EDF Renewables. Ocean Wind, another wind energy developer, has sponsored NJ Audubon’s World Series of Birding event multiple times. The wind industry has also made hefty donations to scientific organizations.
Y2Kyoto: I Miss The Antarctic Ice Cap
It is obviously the wind that is packing the sea ice because -100°F temperatures over Antarctica aren't melting it. https://t.co/9QNXrTd1JM
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) August 12, 2023
If you have a Twitter account, follow him.
Y2Kyoto: End Of Oil
Bloomberg (paywalled): Global Oil Demand Hits Record and Prices May Climb, IEA Says
Global oil demand has surged to a record amid robust consumption in China and elsewhere, threatening to push prices higher, the International Energy Agency said.
World fuel use averaged 103 million barrels a day for the first time in June and may soar even higher in August, the agency said in a report. As Saudi Arabia and its partners constrict supplies, oil markets are tightening significantly.
Y2Kyoto: Global Boiling
The Long Island swimmer who was pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean after treading water for hours was reunited with the two fishing pals who helped save him.
Jim Hohorst, 63, and Michael Ross, 69, said on Wednesday they were out on their boat when they noticed a fishing pole with a shirt tied to it – and then discovered Dan Ho floating helplessly in the ocean.
“If it hadn’t been for that flag you were waving, we never would have spotted you,” Hohorst told Ho at the Bay Shore Marina. “It saved your life.”
Ho, 63, was completely “frozen,” suffering from hypothermia, and exhausted when the pair pulled him out of the ocean off Cedar Beach in Babylon on Monday.
We’re just frogs in their ocean.
Y2Kyoto: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai
The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.
So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I – probably along with you — had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA …
h/t Robert L
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
Germany is facing several tough years due to a combination of transitioning to sustainable energy sources and the rising costs of energy, warned Germany’s Green Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck.
The federal minister, who has long called for a radical energy policy change, said that Germany faces “five tough years ahead” and revealed the country will have to borrow to support companies’ energy costs or lose their industry.
Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
You’ll live in a pod, eat bugs, own nothing and be happy.
REPORTER: "We've seen [Biden] go after gas stoves, A/C units with regulation, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers — now water heaters. How many more home appliances will Americans eventually have to replace?"
KJP: "If it is enacted, it would not take into effect until… pic.twitter.com/xkGMdOdbgV
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 24, 2023
Y2Kyoto: Run Fer Yer Lives!
What the IPCC really says about extreme weather.
…for those who want to know what research actually says on the relationship of extreme weather and climate change, that information is readily available. Today I’ll share the excellent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizing what its most recent assessment says about various types of extreme weather and climate change.
When you read the below you will realize that the difference between what you see in the news (including statements from leading scientists) and what the IPCC has concluded could not be more different. One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic.
“Hot enough for you? No? Change the measurement.”
It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math
In 2021, Jeremiah Thoronka was making a name for himself in clean-energy technology. The then 21-year-old Durham University masters student had invented a device that uses kinetic energy from traffic and pedestrians to generate electricity. It certainly sounded groundbreaking. In a pilot project in Thoronka’s native Sierra Leone, two devices had apparently provided free electricity to 150 households and 15 schools.
Thoronka’s work clearly impressed awards panel judges. In 2021, he picked up the Commonwealth Youth Award and the Global Student Prize, which was presented to him by filmstar Hugh Jackman at a virtual ceremony, broadcast from the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Thoronka was the man of the moment. There was a profile by the BBC, an invitation to give TED talks and, in May 2022, an audience with the pope. He was celebrated as a green-tech innovator, someone setting a clean-energy example for the world to follow.
The accolades have continued to flow. Last month, at the Green Tech Festival in Berlin, he won the Youngster Green Award for 2023. It was this that prompted German journalists to ask if it might all be a little too good to be true. They contacted the organisers of the Youngster Green Award and Greentech Festival to find out a bit more about Thoronka’s pilot project. After all, it sounded incredible. But the organisers said that wouldn’t be possible because the pilot had since been dismantled. They asked if the device was being used anywhere else, and were told that it wasn’t. One journalist even asked if there were any videos, blueprints or other documentation of this unprecedented breakthrough. Again, nothing was forthcoming. In fact, no one could tell journalists much about the device or the pilot project at all.
It seems the Youngster Green Award and Greentech festival organisers, and potentially others, have been willing to take Thoronka’s achievement entirely at face value. Perhaps the pilot was a success; perhaps it wasn’t.
That no one really knows – or cares to know – is telling.
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
Scholz’s three-party alliance agreed on an ambitious agenda to decarbonize the European Union’s biggest economy: getting coal out of the electricity system faster, filling the autobahns with electric vehicles and weaning households off natural gas heating.
Those goals are starting to look ever more distant as Germany’s political mood shifts. First, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turned the energy market upside down, forcing a dash to replace pipeline gas from Siberia and delaying the phaseout of coal. […]
Polls show Europe’s electorates still broadly support net zero goals, but faced with the pressure of higher inflation, that doesn’t mean they’re on board with the climbing costs of making the switch to a greener economy.
Germany’s right-wing and climate-skeptic AfD party has overtaken Scholz’s Social Democrats in popularity. In the UK, Rishi Sunak’s government is backtracking on the climate promises made by Boris Johnson. And France is reeling from riots that are likely to make the climate less of a priority.
The green revolution faces turbulence in Germany and beyond.
Y2Kyoto: The Planet Has A Fever
Y2Kyoto: The Planet Has A Fever
Wine growers in British Columbia are calculating their losses from a bitter cold snap in the province last winter that has devastated vineyards.
Industry representatives are at a Kelowna winery today outlining the effect on vineyards, harvests, revenues and jobs after December’s freeze that saw temperatures in the Okanagan dip to minus 30 C.
Wine Growers B.C. president Miles Prodan says in a statement that the “climate-change related” cold snap had the potential to cut this year’s grape and wine production by between 39 and 56 per cent, with direct revenue losses of up to $145 million.
He cites a grower’s survey that says the impact of the freeze could result in the loss of 381 jobs, representing a 20 per cent reduction in the industry’s workforce.
They’re shameless.
Y2Kyoto: Down In Flames
“Experts say dry air, strong winds, parched trees and grass and soaring temperatures caused the Oak fire to expand rapidly through the rugged foothills in recent days. The area has experienced nearly two weeks of triple digit temperatures and low humidity,” The Guardian reported of the Oak Fire as it spread. “All this comes at a time when the state is seeing increasingly destructive and deadly blazes and the climate crisis creates conditions ripe for destruction.”
Taxpayer funded (in part) PBS emphasized that the Oak Fire was one of the “devastating consequences” of the “global climate crisis.”
Over at CNN, Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir explained how a “‘megadrought’ driven by climate change that is affecting California and other western states has left plenty of dry, flammable material that can become fuel so quickly, especially when humidity is low and winds are high.”
I won’t spoil the punchline.
Related: Day 8 of rain in central Alberta after we were told the worst drought ever seen in Alberta was because we don’t pay enough carbon tax.
Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Warning
"The weather agency issued a snowfall warning for Highway 93 in Banff National Park from Lake Louise, Alta., to Saskatchewan River Crossing, Alta., and from Jasper, Alta., to Saskatchewan River Crossing."#ableg #abpolihttps://t.co/swoS0TPbfD
— Alberta Institute (@AB_Institute) June 19, 2023
Y2Kyoto: Below Net Zero
Y2Kyoto: Goodness! Gracious!
I’m reading a new paper claiming attribution of all increased burned area in CA to climate change
Turco et al in PNAS todayAnthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California
They start their data in 1971 even though reliable data exists much earlier, so I’m curious …