Image by emely krause from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The world backs away slowly:
China and India were never there with Net Zero, the US was, then wasn’t, Canada appeared to be, but in order to be electable, Mark Carney dropped the country’s carbon tax the minute he was appointed PM (because his opponent, Pierre Poilievre had made repealing the federal carbon tax a central plank of his platform). The President of Mexico was a PhD in energy engineering and environmental policy, but now talks about “energy security” and boosting oil and gas production. Meanwhile New Zealand has reversed the oil and gas ban, encourages mining, and will delay the pricing of agricultural emissions by five years.
With impeccable timing, just as Australia announces a new more impossible target, Germany and France are squabbling over the EU target, and the EU will now miss the UN deadline.
European Union Faces Climate Target Delay, Risks Missing UN Deadline
By Seneca ESG
The European Union is at risk of missing a key United Nations deadline to submit updated climate targets, as internal disagreements stall progress on a proposed emissions reduction goal for 2040. The bloc had aimed to cut emissions by approximately 90% compared to 1990 levels by 2040, forming a critical milestone on the path to net-zero by 2050.
However, several member states—most notably France, Italy, and Poland—have raised concerns over the economic impact and feasibility of such an ambitious target. These objections led to the postponement of a planned Environment Council vote, originally scheduled for mid-September. As a result, EU leaders are expected to revisit the issue at a high-level summit in October.
In the interim, the EU is considering a “statement of intent” that outlines a potential emissions reduction range of 66.3% to 72.5% by 2035, relative to 1990 level.
France has been leading the way to delay the announcement, especially of the 2040 target.
Even the New York Times, Masthead for The Blob, is lamenting the collapse of the Paris agreement hopes and dreams.
There is a tiny bit of soul-searching here (but not much). Mostly this is just nostalgia.
It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.
by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times
Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. … Paris wasn’t just a brief flare of climate optimism. To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era…
Lo, Climate Action filled a spiritual void (and you thought it was supposed to stop storms?)
But with the global war on terror long since dissipated into tragic farce and a new Cold War not yet well crystallized in the public imagination, the American-led global order seemed to be missing some sense of purpose, too. Here came the existential project of climate action to fill that semi-spiritual void, at least for some of those who felt it.
Now almost everywhere we look climate alarm has become “complacency and indifference”…
To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election. To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world. Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference.
Progressives long believed that climate politics was a kind of tug of war, in which tugging harder would pull many on the other side over the line into grudging support. To some degree, that is what happened after Paris, with advocates shifting the Overton window pretty dramatically and winning meaningful gains along the way.
But it also looks a bit as if they pulled so hard they collapsed in disarray.
The author, David Wells-Wallace, spends the second half of the article pretending that renewables will still take over the grid (we’re installing so many, he says!). He doesn’t realize how little fossil fuel energy they are displacing.
Scott Adams, too, wonders where the climate hysteria has gone?
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist remarks — “the climate change hysteria has gone away.”
He quotes someone called coddled affluent professional — who has a theory on why climate change hysteria has gone. He wonders if it was all astroturfed because billionaires were funding hysteria? And theorizes that now that the climate spigot has dried up, the billionaires can’t be bothered raising hell. Adams points out that since the government took away the big money, there ought to be more climate angst about the world, not less — unless, of course, the degree of complaining was related to how much money they could get out of the issue.
— ht Tom Nelson and Climate Depot
For the moment, the last stand of pure climate hysteria left in the world is in Australia.