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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

Abandoning oil and gas a utopian impossibility, Alberta’s premier says – by Janet French (CBC News Edmonton – August 9, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/

Alberta’s premier says it’s impossible for people living in a cold, northern climate like Canada to abandon fossil fuels, despite the dire conclusions of an international climate change report.

While the United Nations’ Secretary General said the report should sound a “death knell” for coal and fossil fuels, Premier Jason Kenney said demand for the subterranean fruits of this oil-rich province isn’t going anywhere.

“The notion that we can shut off a major, industrialized economy with the flick of a switch is patently unrealistic,” Kenney told reporters at a news conference at an Edmonton brewery on Monday.

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These Canadian stocks benefit from U.S. electric vehicle pledge – by Scott Barlow (Globe and Mail – August 10, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

U.S. President Joe Biden and the major U.S. automakers have pledged to set a target for electric vehicle sales of 50 per cent of total purchases by 2030, highlighting the steady (and heavily subsidized) trend toward decarbonized and electrified developed world economies.

The global research team at Bank of America Securities is attempting to identify the biggest corporate beneficiaries of the electrification movement, recommending stocks across industry sectors and including a significant number of Canadian companies.

BofA strategist Thomas Thornton, in a recent research note, raised his 2025 EV sales forecasts from 4.5 per cent to 7 per cent of total sales; by 2030, he now expects EVs to account for 20 per cent of total sales, up from 12.5 per cent.

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Biden calls for half of new cars to be electric or plug-in hybrids by 2030 – by Dino Grandoni and Brady Dennis (Washington Post – August 5, 2021)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

President Biden on Thursday unveiled a far-reaching, multipronged plan to make U.S. cars and light trucks more fuel-efficient and to begin a shift to electric vehicles over the coming decade.

The move marks one of the administration’s most consequential pushes so far to combat climate change and tackle the nation’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The suite of new goals and mandates, forged after months of talks with car manufacturers, autoworkers and environmental groups, is meant to transform the kind of vehicles Americans drive and to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

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Other Voices: Biden infrastructure plan targets state’s coal communities – by Deb Haaland (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – August 1, 2021)

https://www.post-gazette.com/

Deb Haaland is the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.

As I travel throughout America, I am filled with hope as I see businesses open and communities recovering. Thanks to President Joe Biden’s leadership in passing the American Rescue Plan and making progress in defeating COVID-19, economic growth is up and unemployment is down.

The nation’s ongoing economic recovery is opening opportunities to help stabilize and empower workers who have been facing economic instability since before the pandemic.

During my trip to Schuylkill County earlier this month, I saw firsthand how hardworking coal communities here in Pennsylvania helped power our country, but are now facing significant challenges in restoring their community environments and retooling toward developing a robust and sustainable clean energy future.

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Why China makes Trudeau’s carbon tax irrelevant – by Lorrie Goldstein (Toronto Sun – July 31, 2021)

https://torontosun.com/

In 2019, China for the first time generated more emissions than the entire developed world combined

Whenever human-induced climate change is discussed during Canada’s upcoming federal election, keep in mind the country that matters most on this issue is China and the fossil fuel that matters most in China is coal.

The reason is that whatever China does makes whatever Canada does irrelevant in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s because coal — not oil — is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel and the main contributor to global emissions. In China, coal-fired electricity supplies 57% of its energy needs. In Canada it’s 7.4%.

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Coal-spewing China has taken the world’s climate hostage – by Terry Glavin (National Post – July 29, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

While we’ve been busy beating up on Albertans and their oil, Beijing has been laughing at us

After having ransacked the economies of the world’s liberal democracies and wrecked what is still quaintly called the “rules-based international order,” Xi Jinping’s police state in Beijing has now made it abundantly clear that under Xi’s supreme-leader command, the People’s Republic is determined to seize the global agenda on climate change.

And if the world responds with Canadian-style accommodation and capitulation, Beijing will persist in its ambitions — even to the point of taking the global climate hostage while the rest of us, as well as the Chinese people, suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate change.

More heat domes, more apocalyptic floods, more ruinous ecological collapse.

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BHP charges up Nickel West with clean energy – by Nickolas Zakharia (Australian Mining – July 30, 2021)

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BHP plans to install two solar farms and a battery storage system to power the Mt Keith and Leinster mines at its Nickel West operations in Western Australia.

The clean energy sources are expected to cut emissions from electricity at the two mines by 12 per cent based on its 2020 financial year levels.

The Northern Goldfields Solar Project will include a 27.4-megawatt solar farm at Mt Keith, and a 10.7-megawatt solar farm and 10.1-megawatt battery at Leinster to reduce diesel and gas power.

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We’re getting too far ahead on our climate policies that kill oil and gas jobs – by Jack Mintz (Financial Post – July 29, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Federal policies that halt fossil fuel development too quickly can have only one result: to make us poorer

Is Canada moving too quickly with climate-change policies to kill oil and gas jobs? After all, while we are pushing up the carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, the U.S. doesn’t even have a pricing policy yet.

And on top of our aggressive carbon pricing, we are also adopting important — and burdensome — new measures such as clean fuel standards, electric-vehicle substitution and building retrofits.

The federal government has also declared plastics toxic and introduced aggressive environmental regulations to stop fossil-fuel development.

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Climate scientists begin key report as G20 failed to reach phase-out coal deal – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – July 26, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

More than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists began working Monday on an updated version of a key report summarizing how Earth’s climate has already changed, and what humans can expect for the rest of the century.

The last time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that coordinates research about global warming, published this report was in 2013.

At the time, the experts said humans were the “dominant cause” of global warming since the 1950s. The document paved the way for the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015.

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Questioning The Sustainability Of Biden’s Brave New Green World – by David Blackmon (Forbes Magazine – July 25, 2021)

https://www.forbes.com/

A Biden administration official who heads up the Department of Energy’s Loans Program office complained this week that U.S. government and industry were not investing nearly enough in ‘clean’ energy programs and projects to meet the administration’s climate change goals.

The official, Jigar Shah, speaking in an episode of the CERAWeek Conversation series sponsored by IHS Markit, estimated total U.S. investment currently to be roughly $200 billion per year, but then stated that the total annual spending needs to be more like $1 trillion.

“The pace at which we are deploying climate solutions is wholly unacceptable,” he said, continuing on to say that “We perennially have too much money and not enough projects.

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Net zero is fantasy. Net reductions are easy — with LNG – by Gwyn Morgan (Financial Post – July 22, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

The biggest opportunity for emissions reduction lies in a fossil fuel that is in practically unlimited supply

At their meeting last month G7 leaders agreed to a greenhouse gas emissions target of “net zero” by 2050. That would require phasing out all fossil fuels. But how? The common reply is “putting a price on carbon,”, i.e., carbon taxes.

But unless there’s a viable alternative, taxing something people can’t do without only makes them poorer. Policy makers seem to believe that “green power,” meaning wind and solar, is the answer.

But despite hundreds of billions of dollars having been spent on them, wind and solar currently account for only 3.3 per cent of world energy supply.

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G-20 Countries struggling to drive economies to net-zero transition (Mining Review Africa – July 20, 2021)

https://www.miningreview.com/

Bloomberg Philanthropies and BloombergNEF has released a new Climate Policy Factbook outlining the progress that each G-20 member country has made toward moving to a low-carbon economy.

The report was released to increase transparency and inform policy priorities ahead of upcoming international climate negotiations, including the G-20 Summit and Ministerial Meetings, the 75th Session of the U.N. General Assembly, and COP26.

The Climate Policy Factbook highlights three concrete areas in which immediate government action is needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius: 1) phasing out support for fossil fuels, 2) putting a price on emissions, and 3) encouraging climate risk disclosure. In each of these areas, the report found that the policies of many G-20 countries were significantly off course.

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Coventry puts forward ‘mission critical’ plan for electric car battery plant – by Jillian Ambrose (The Guardian – July 15, 2021)

https://www.theguardian.com/

Plans for a “mission critical” electric car battery plant in Coventry have accelerated in a drive to keep automotive production at the heart of the West Midlands region.

Coventry city council has put forward a blueprint for a 5.7m square feet “gigafactory”, which could create up to 6,000 new jobs, in partnership with Coventry airport where the plant would be located.

The joint venture first revealed its plans in February with the hope of submitting planning permission by the end of the year and attracting an experienced manufacturer to start production by 2025.

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EU unveils sweeping climate change plan (BBC.com – July 14, 2021)

https://www.bbc.com/

The European Union has announced a raft of climate change proposals aimed at pushing it towards its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. A dozen draft proposals, which still need to be approved by the bloc’s 27 member states and the EU parliament, were announced on Wednesday.

They include plans to tax jet fuel and effectively ban the sale of petrol and diesel powered cars within 20 years. The proposals, however, could face years of negotiations.

The plans triggered serious infighting at the European Commission, the bloc’s administrative arm, as the final tweaks were being made, sources told the AFP news agency.

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Can Environmentalists Handle the Truth about Mining? – by Jack Lifton (Investor Intel – July 13, 2021)

https://investorintel.com/

Solar panels and wind turbines cannot even begin to supply the concentrated
power needed for smelters, steel furnaces, copper refining, aluminum
production, and myriads of other energy intensive necessary processes.

The recovery of the amount of non-fuel natural resources necessary for the world, or even just the USA, or the EU, or China, to go “green” would simultaneously entail the construction of a massively enlarged minerals processing industry the likes of which the world has not seen since the creation and growth of the steel industry, which is and will remain the structural backbone of our civilization.

Much of the sourcing and processing infrastructure that is needed for its own domestic consumption of natural resources has already been accomplished by China.

But for the rest of the world, such resource recovery and processing onto useful forms at that “greening” scale would require the diversion of a significant percentage of national GDPs for decades.

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