(Bloomberg) — Put aside the trade and technology wars. The next race for global political and economic supremacy will focus on climate.
That’s according to Bank of America Corp.’s research group, which said climate change will be this decade’s most important theme, just as technology underpinned economic growth during the past decade.
China has spent twice as much as the U.S. on climate action, said Haim Israel, the bank’s head of global thematic investing research, in a report Monday.
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Mining and oil companies, among the world’s largest polluters and emitters of planet-warming carbon dioxide, are cleaning up their acts. A process that started slowly and reluctantly is now moving with the momentum of a freight train. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that their black-to-green transformations are not necessarily good for the planet and could even result in more carbon output, not less.
How could that be? Booting carbon-intensive products such as coal, oil, natural gas and iron ore out of the business model of mining and energy companies does not mean these commodities will cease being produced; they will just be produced by someone else.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
In the global push to avert catastrophic climate change, investors’ new mantra is ESG – environmental, social and governance – and resource companies are looking for ways to sell, merge and change their businesses to follow the money
The mining industry is embarking on a black-to-green revolution that will almost certainly trigger an unprecedented wave of sales and mergers, reshaping the world’s top companies.
Industry bosses told The Globe and Mail that intense pressure from environmental, social and governance (ESG) investors to meet climate targets will prompt imaginative efforts by big mining companies to dump, or greatly reduce, their exposure to their dirtiest, most carbon-intensive assets – mostly coal, oil and iron ore – commodities that are taking on pariah status after having powered two centuries of industrialization.
“We are about to see a game-changing scenario,” said Mark Cutifani, the CEO of Anglo American , one of the world’s biggest diversified mining companies. “At some point soon, there will be a restructuring of businesses and assets, starting with thermal coal.”
Wind farms and massive arrays of solar panels are cropping up across public and private landscapes both in the United States and abroad as users increasingly turn to “green energy” as their preferred flavor of electricity.
President Joe Biden, in fact, has directed the Interior Department to identify suitable places to host 20 gigawatts of new energy from sun, wind or geothermal resources by 2024 as part of a sweeping effort to move away from a carbon-based economy and electrical grid. But how green is green?
Although countries are feverishly looking to install wind and solar farms to wean themselves off carbon-based, or so-called “dirty” energy, few countries, operators and the industry itself have yet to fully tackle the long-term consequences of how to dispose of these systems, which have their own environmental hazards like toxic metals, oil, fiberglass and other material.
Peter Tertzakian: The transition to an electrified clean energy economy is going to result in a monumental draw on metals and minerals from the earth’s crust
Like many in the energy business, I marvel at how fast the cost of producing renewable power, LED light bulbs and lithium-ion batteries has fallen over the past decade. Depending on what’s being measured, some costs are down by more than 90 per cent.
Should we assume these downward-trending cost curves are sustainable? And will this type of cost reduction be applicable to other emerging clean energy devices?
Based on advances in technology and more efficient manufacturing processes, the short answer is a qualified yes. Yet, we shouldn’t be blinded by the glow of the new economy — things like data science, process engineering, robotics and advanced materials — which, to date, have been the principal drivers for achieving these cost reductions.
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(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden enlisted the entire U.S. government in the fight against climate change on Wednesday, even telling the Central Intelligence Agency to consider global warming a national security threat.
Yet he left out coal — the fossil fuel most widely blamed for global warming — when he froze the sale of leases to extract oil and gas from federal land.
It was a conspicuous omission for a president who has vowed to make the electric grid carbon-free by 2035 and who has said the world’s “future rests in renewable energy.”
Vowing to ‘build back better’, US President Joe Biden has placed climate change high on his administration’s agenda, with plans to achieve 100% clean energy and to commit to net zero by 2050.
Underlining its intent, the US re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty on climate change with a goal to limit global temperature rise to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.
Biden has promised a $2-trillion accelerated investment over his first term aimed at building modern, sustainable infrastructure to support the transition to a clean energy economy.
Canadian hopes of overcoming Biden’s climatism look hopeless
Canadians aiming to break through the Democratic Party climate policy barricades, past the army of anti-fossil-fuel green activists surrounding Joe Biden’s White House, are likely to be disappointed.
Political experts grounded in the world of diplomacy, negotiation and reasoned argument seem to believe that a careful strategic approach to the New Green Washington will enable Canada to forge new bilateral energy pacts that would, among other things, allow the $9-billion Keystone XL oil pipeline to proceed.
The false assumption behind such optimism is that the global climate policy agenda has some grounding in economic and technological logic and sound science, as if it were part of a well-thought-out master plan to restructure the world energy system so as to avoid an inevitable environmental crisis that allegedly poses a threat to the very existence of humans on the planet.
Miners are targeting massive carbon reductions over the next 10 to 15 years on the path to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with equity research company Jefferies warning that this implies higher costs and capital expenditure (capex), but also a trend of less supply, higher commodity prices, higher free cash flow and higher share prices.
The commitment to net-zero emissions is a result of mining companies coming under increasing pressure to make explicit and sizable capital commitments for initiatives that target the reduction of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions in line with global plans to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming.
Some miners – like Fortescue, Rio Tinto, BHP, Newmont and Vale – have given explicit guidance about investment in such initiatives, Jefferies says in its equity research report for metals and mining, published on January 6.
At the start of the year, the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet.
It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business and cultural elites.
It has been quite the rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the centre. It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left.
A stroll down Stockholm’s longest street that takes its name from the mythical Valhalla, where Norse gods feast and fight until doomsday, gives a hint of the battle today’s power grids face to keep pace with government goals to electrify transport.
Early this month, a man selling Christmas trees looked on as workers installed 10 public vehicle charging stations with two power outlets each in Valhallavägen, which is around 2.17 miles long. It’s progress, but not enough.
Sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles during the first nine months of 2020 rose by 122% in the European Union, accounting for about 8% of new car sales, industry figures show.
The dirtiest fossil fuel dominates the economy, but it’s at odds with the nation’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2060.
The future of coal looks like an ice-cream truck parked half a kilometer down a mine shaft in China’s Shanxi province. The yellow-and-white vehicle is equipped with a 5G router from Huawei Technologies Co. to gather data for the mine’s control center, where technicians monitor high-definition feeds on a screen the size of a two-story house.
They’re tracking temperature and methane concentrations while keeping watch over the black lumps zipping along conveyor belts on the way up to waiting trucks.
The data collection would previously have been done by workers down in the pit, but Yangquan Coal Industry Group has managed to eliminate some of those workers and virtualize the least appealing aspect of mine labor.
To try to sell the hiked carbon tax as an answer to the economic devastation of the past year is a breathless audacity
Are there any so naïve who did not believe the Trudeau government would work to slyly entwine the protracted and immiserating COVID-19 crisis with its global warming obsession?
Take advantage of a time when economic reality is at its bleakest, the citizens of Canada anxious and unsettled, our national treasury pillaged, and — just for good measure, when Christmas itself is cancelled — slap an outrageous carbon tax on everyone? It’s a lump of coal (carbon) in every Canadian’s Christmas stocking, compliments of Santa J.
They are a shifty lot. Deliberately appropriating the emotions and character of the pandemic and rhetorically slapping them on “the fight against climate change.” It is political cynicism with a smiley face.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre was falsely condemned recently for trading in conspiracy theories.
His accusers were Liberals and liberal media who misrepresented what “The Great Reset” of society — advocated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations (where it’s called “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”) — means.
It means what Poilievre said it means — global elites using the COVID-19 pandemic and recession to fundamentally reshape society, reduce economic freedom and transfer wealth from the developed to the developing world.
Chile’s Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, has outlined sustainability plans in five areas of action for its operations and projects, including goals to cut carbon emissions by 70%, reduce inland water consumption by 60% and recycling 65% of its industrial waste by 2030.
The state-owned miner, which in 2017 planned to sell “green copper” at a premium price to customers using more sustainable practices like renewable energy, now favours a broader initiative.
The plan, centred around five key points, seeks to reduce around three quarters of the company’s carbon emissions by creating what it calls a “100% clean energy matrix”.
