China built 47GW of coal power last year and is “way off track” to meet emissions targets

By Jo Nova

If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.

Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds

Eric Ng, South China Morning Post

Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.

According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:

Climate Lockdowns Begin for the workers: France bans short flights for passengers but not private jets

By Jo Nova

It is in effect: If there is a train and it’s less than a 2.5 hour trip, in France you can’t fly — unless of course, you own your own private jet, the most “polluting” kind of plane (according to the EcoWorriers). How does that make “carbon sense”? Are we saving the planet, or just stopping the riff-raff from traveling?

It’s one rule for you, another for the Feudal overlords.

Private planes make 5 to 14 times as much CO2, but they are “good to go”?

by Valentina Morando, Impakter

… numerous studies demonstrate that private jets are much more impactful to the environment than other modes of transportations.

They are about “5 to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes (per passenger),” a report published by the Transport and Environment group in 2021 states.

According to a recent study, “only 1% of the population causes 50% of global aviation emissions.”

Right now there are only three routes in France that will be banned, Paris-Orly to Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon affecting only 2.5% of all domestic flights. The original plan was to ban five more routes, but the […]

Here’s real Misinformation: The average Australian thinks we make an astonishing 10% of global emissions

What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.

Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.

Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?

Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.

But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.

Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate […]

Australians: still the Global Patsy grand achievers of climate change with 46% cuts, but we’re getting better at selling that

PRE NOTE: Obviously Australian emissions of free aerial fertilizer are a net benefit to the world, and we should be paid for them, not charged. But in this world of witchcraft, and lacking a billionaire celebrity who can win elections and face down the media mob — this post is about the obvious, immediately doable ways to reduce the burden of being the worlds Global Patsy. Read it in that spirit. Even within a game with stupid rules, it’s time to go on the attack..

Suddenly the Australian government uses the magic term “Per Capita” and baffles the commentariat

While the rest of the world revels in their glorious fantasy future carbon “targets” the Australian government has finally realized that the measurement units “per country” suited the European overlords, and it was time to reframe the debate.

I have been saying for years, years and years, that Australia has been the Star Global Patsy, doing more per capita than any other nation despite being the fastest growing, furthest, remotest, sparsest and most dependent economy on coal. This is despite most nations of Earth not even pretending to meet their targets. In a quiet moment, even believers in the […]

Windfarms threaten peat bogs and turn them into carbon emitters

More ironies. One fifth of all soil carbon is stored in peat bogs. Unfortunately when industrial wind turbines are built on them, the damage turns them from carbon sinks to carbon sources thus neutralizing the point of building the wind farm.

The headline evokes some supernatural power:

Wind farms built on carbon-rich peat bogs lose their ability to fight climate change

As if the magical whirly totem stick loses the gift of weather control when placed on a peat bog?

But the real damage is not just to wallets for another pointless windfarm. Peat bogs are so much more than carbon sinks — they are also an archive of paleohistory and the ancient climate. Indeed, even though cattle, wind and rain can damage the bogs, the researchers now say the wind farms now pose the “most serious risk” of all. Apparently the vehicle access tracks create artificial streams that drain the peat. The drainage changes are pervasive and “affect the whole peatland” not just the part near the track.

The “blanket bogs” are rare, but occur from Spain to Norway in Europe as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Korea.

The paper is a thinly disguised plea from bog […]

Humans do Ultimate Paris Lockdown, CO2 hits record high anyway

The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant

Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved.

It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile. Obviously Ecoworriers want to take that failure and do more of it.

The world just broke a disturbing trend despite the global lockdown

Tracey Keeling

…the data reveals that two months of significantly reduced human activity did not make a dent in the damage we’ve done to the planet. It ultimately confirms that nothing short of wholesale systemic change will do – with the rejection of fossil fuels at the heart of that transformation.

“Surprised” is not the word. When the punters realize that empty streets and skies makes no difference, there could be a monumental crisis of motivation coming. Games up?

The Scientists Just Told Us Coronavirus Won’t Save Us from Climate Change

The National Interest

“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak […]

Australia installs more renewables than anywhere else but national emissions stay the same

Australians are installing renewable energy, per capita, faster than any place on Earth, or at least we were until 2020 when the subsidies and schemes ran out.

Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables

 

The Quarterly update for the Greenhouse Gas inventory is out and we can see just how much difference all those renewables make, which is almost nothing. Emissions have flatlined.

Australians are paying record prices, risking blackouts, buying batteries and synchronous condensors, building new billion dollar interconnectors, losing companies overseas, and suffering voltage spikes. We’re playing chicken with our smelters, and party games with PeakSmart timers and extra domestic circuits so that electricity companies can manage our pool pumps and our air conditioners.

And this is all we get?

Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables

After adding so many wind farms and solar panels the electricity sector decreased emissions by only 1.2% on the year before.

Electricity sector emissions decreased 1.8 per cent in the June quarter of 2019 on a ‘seasonally adjusted and weather normalised’P 8 P basis (Figure 6). This reflected strong increases in hydro and wind generation (42.0 and 14.8 per cent) […]

New finding: Phytoplankton are much bigger players in CO2 levels than realized

Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work

Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.

Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore | Alison Taylor.

Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.

Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.

He […]

Save the world and raze some forests

Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.

So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…

Now they ask?

How much can forests fight climate change? Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours. Gabrielle Popkin, Nature

As usual, the debate is based […]

Australia is worst casualty of Paris: Big hit to GDP, wages, dollar, trade balance for nothing

Australia Wins The Global Patsy Award 2019

The Brookings Institute released a report that claims everyone is better off economically by sticking to Paris, but check out the devastating graphs. Economically, everyone is a loser, but the three biggest losers are Australia, Russia and OPEC.

Australia is doing more, paying more, suffering more and yet will make almost no difference to the global emissions tally in anything other than a purely symbolic impress-your-dinner–guests kind of way.

If Australia left the Paris Agreement, even the left leaning Brookings Institute can’t find much difference in total global man-made emissions. Australia is forcing the renewables transformation faster than anywhere else, it will lose GDP, wages, jobs, investment, and the dollar will fall. All that, and no one could even tell the difference between Paris with Australia, and Paris without.

Clearly Australian negotiators at the UN are incompetent on a whole new scale. If they had Australian’s interests at heart, even a little bit, they would have done this study themselves, and gone to Paris with some realistic comparative data to argue that we are cutting too fast and paying too much. Finalists for most useless Global Negotiator of the Decade are Kevin Rudd, […]

Iceland Katla volcano emits up to 24,000 tons of CO2 per day, may be about to blow (Or Not)

Either Katla in Iceland is about to blow or it isn’t. It is a subglacial volcano giving off five to ten times more CO2 than vulcanologists expected. This has some experts spooked, though others are saying it’s not that unusual.

UPDATE: The lead researcher herself adds that her work does not suggest an eruption is imminent, nor that it would be like the theEyjafjallajokull eruption in any case. h/t Pat for the new take. Apparently The Sunday Times has been exaggerating… “Ilyinskaya tweeted that she has previously told the Sunday Times that “the severity of Eyjafjallajökull air traffic disruption was very unusual and unlikely to happen if Katla erupts, and still, they quote me as saying exactly the opposite!”

Katla volcano set to erupt, Patrick Knox, The Sun

Katla Volcano, Iceland, 1918

Icelandic and British volcanologists have detected Katla— Icelandic for “kettle” or “boiler” — is emitting carbon dioxide on a huge scale which suggests magma chambers are filling up fast.

According to the Sunday Times, the scientists believe it could be an indicator that an eruption could be brewing which would overshadow the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010.

The emissions are in […]

Australia overdoes carbon reduction by 294Mt: could cool world by 0.0002C extra (maybe)

Absolutely best possible reduction in global temperature because of the latest announcement of a Australian carbon mitigation surplus.

Other countries are failing to meet their targets, but we’re not only achieving them, we’re overdoing it. And this is despite our obvious handicaps: like that we have rapid population growth, are further from everywhere and anywhere* except for Antarctica, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world.

The latest Australian Greenhouse emissions figures are out, and the Energy Minister is very excited:

Emissions are now the lowest on a per capita and GDP basis in 28 years, having fallen 34 per cent and 58 per cent respectively since 1990. Just as Australia beat its first Kyoto target by 128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, we are on track to easily surpass our 2020 target.

The latest data indicates we will overachieve by 294 million tonnes, a 30 per cent improvement on the year prior. When one considers one million tonnes of carbon abatement is equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road for a year, this is substantial.

Substantial?- Don’t undersell this — that’s like taking 88 million cars off the road! Holy hat! That’s […]

100 companies to blame for 71% of carbon “pollution”, but world’s worst corporates are Big Government

The Carbon Majors Report came out two weeks ago has been used to stoke Marxist fears that “corporates” are polluting the world.

These 100 Companies Are to Blame For 71% of The World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions

[ScienceAlert]

Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.

Tess Riley of The Guardian tells us that “A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change”. She goes on to name the worst corporations: “ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988″. It’s not til the ninth paragraph we find that: “A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report.”

Only a fifth?

Look closely — the Worst corporate “polluters” are Big Government, not […]

Spot the problem: Man-made emissions flat, but global CO2 hits record high

Yet again, as the onion is peeled we find that at every stage the human influence is so small it is undetectable. Go with the data — humans are not even driving global CO2 levels. What does? — maybe ocean currents, phytoplankton, Australian deserts something else…

The Guardian trumpeted the rise of renewables as the reason man-made emissions of CO2 have stopped rising. Oh Bravo.

Graph — IEA

Note the success and grand achievement of trillions spent on expensive electricity and carbon trading programs — record global CO2.

Here’s the newest Mauna Loa figures showing an unprecedented high of 408 evil ppm, a tipping point, a sign of numerical doom. Run, run ye heathens!

Why are CO2 levels so high — A record El Nino in 2016 perhaps?

We need global anti-ENSO programs. Give us more money. Save the tradewinds!

Chinese Emissions? Take the emissions figures with a pound of salt. Carbon accounting is hopelessly inaccurate, China can’t be trusted, and everything else is a guess. How can we run a global market on figures so prone to corruption. Is China artificially elevating figures now so they can make cheap “reductions” in future, or are they underestimating […]

Cut carbon emissions by 50%? — Greens nightmare — Coal gasification may be the answer

A new MIT report suggests a better way to use coal in power-stations and potentially cut CO2 emissions by 50%. The process involves gasifying coal and producing electricity in one process at the same site. The coal only has to be heated once, and the electricity comes from a fuel cell, not a fire — it’s a chemical reaction across a membrane. The output is potentially much more efficient, and makes no ash. The researchers argue we could get twice as much electricity for each ton of coal burned. Currently coal fired power pulls out 30% of the chemical energy in coal, but coupling these two processes might increase it to 55-60%.

This report is based on simulations, but the separate processes are already well developed and running. The next step would be a fully functioning pilot plant to put the two together and test the idea. If there was the political will it could be done in a few years. There probably won’t be.

The Greens of course will hate the idea because the Evil-Factor of coal is near 100%.

In the eco-collectivist-world, cutting “carbon” is important, but apparently not as important as propping up a dependent lobby group […]

CO2 emissions? It’s China China China all the way down…

No matter which way we slice and dice it, China is The-CO2-Player that matters. India is forecast for a larger percentage-wise increase, but it’s starting from a small base. By 2030 even after doubling its output, it will still be barely a quarter of China’s total mega-ton production. The Congo and Indonesia are among countries forecast to ramp up production of CO2 massively, yet both of them are but a spec. The hard numbers show that if CO2 actually mattered, and the eco-greens really cared about it, they be talking about “The China Problem”.

Australia is irrelevant, except in some symbolic sacrificial way. The 28% massive reduction, at great cost, will amount to nothing globally (assuming it can even be achieved). Though Tasmania may win the global race for the fastest transition from first to third world. (North Korea here we come).

In the end, the real drivers of global CO2 may or may not be things like forest and peat fires, ocean currents, phytoplankton in any case. Won’t it be a great day when we figure exactly where all that CO2 is coming from and going to?

— Jo

 

[…]

Since 2000 humans have put out 30% of their total CO2 but there is nothing to show for it.

The global “pause” has been running for nearly 19 years. But a whopping 30% of all the human emissions of fossil fuels, ever, has come out since the year 2000. Nearly 40% of all our emissions since 1990.

All that CO2, and nothing to show for it. Half of all human emissions of “carbon pollution” have occurred since 1987.

 

Here’s your handy reckoning table for human emissions from 1751 – 2014. (I know you’ve been waiting for it). Next time you need to know what percentage of the total human emissions of CO2 has been emitted since, say, Ash Wednesday, Cyclone Tracy, or Napoleon, or whatever, this is the table you need. When we hear that it’s the warmest summer since 1939, this table tells us what the CO2 levels were in 1939.

8.7 out of 10 based on 113 ratings […]

The mystery of a massive 9Gt of CO2 that came and went — could it be phytoplankton?

There is a mystery peak in global CO2 levels in 1990. For some reason from 1989 suddenly global carbon levels jumped higher than they normal would and by 9,000 million tonnes (that’s equivalent to 2,500 mT of carbon)*. It’s only a little blip in an upward line, but as a deviation from the long steady norm, it’s a dramatic change (see the second graph below). Within a few years the excess disappeared and the reasonably straight line increase in CO2 resumed. The sudden jump is equivalent to nearly half of our total annual human fossil fuel emissions. Nothing about this peak fits with the timing of human induced fossil fuel emissions. These were not big years in our output (indeed it coincides with the collapse of the soviet block when inefficient Russian industry was shut down) .

The mystery of the massive CO2 bubble exposes how little we know about why CO2 levels rise and fall, and whether human emissions make much difference. The world is spending $4 billion dollars a day trying to change this global CO2 level of 0.04% (400ppm) but apparently other large forces are at work pushing up CO2, and then absorbing […]

Factories in China produce four times as much CO2 as Western factories

China is making the world’s products, but in terms of carbon they are horribly inefficient compared to the West. Old factories and coal fired electricity mean the country is pouring out CO2 — not that that matters, but it rather puts the squeeze on anyone who thinks it’s good for the environment to shut down clean western factories and give that production to China.

Figure 2 | China’s emission exports and the top exporting provinces. a The emissions embodied in goods exported from China to the US, EU and Japan are shown, representing 58% of all emissions embodied in trade in 2007 (the largest flows are labelled in MtCO2 yr-1.

A new study came out by Lui et al. with headlines all over like “Goods manufactured in China not good for the environment, study finds”. But none of these media outlets put a number on it — how much more polluting were these Chinese factories? The answer was right there in table 1 of the paper. Lui et al compare 15 products made in China and the EU, and found that China produces 4.4 times the emissions of CO2 in order to produce the same product.

When Chinese workers […]

Those Green Australians! Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990

Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.

The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?

As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like […]