Emissions (CO2)

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:

A God or a Government? Labor legislates climate fantasy and tech inventions too, all by 2030

By Jo Nova

Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.

Gone are the days when governments figured out how laws could be enforced before they made them. In their own words this is only “a massive transformation of the economy”, so who cares about the details like, is it possible, and what will it cost?

And of course that all important detail “why bother in the first place?”

The Australian government has just legislated a 43% cut to emissions of a beneficial trace gas, of which Australia makes 1.1% of human output and about 0.05% of the emissions of all the plants, algae and oceans on Earth. We’ve only got 8 years to do it in and even the head of the our largest national scientific institute admits nearly half of the technologies we need are not even invented yet.

Even the minister calls it “insanely late”.

What could possibly go wrong, apart from bankrupting the nation in an effort to change the weather?

Climate target set, now for the tricky bit on cutting emissions

Greg Brown, The Australian

Anthony Albanese’s climate change agenda will shift to creating two road maps to slash emissions […]

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 […]

CSIRO says we need to do pandemic type shutdowns every year to meet Paris

They told us if we stopped driving our cars that global CO2 levels would fall. But after 6 months of the most draconian low carbon diet ever, Cape Grimm Tasmania is still measuring a normal rise in CO2 levels.

Here’s the wild absurdity — Covid restrictions are expected to cut human emissions by 4 – 7% but to reach the Paris Target, we “need” exactly that kind of reduction every single year for the next ten years.

h/t to Chris Gillham again

Carbon dioxide levels over Australia rose even after COVID-19 forced global emissions down. Here’s why

Zoe Loh, Helen Cleaugh, Paul Krummel, Ray Langanfelds, The Conversion

…our measurements show more CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere between January and July 2020 than during the same period in 2017 or 2018.

Look at the graph (below) of CO2 levels rising on their annual cycle each year.

There was a huge reduction from 2016 to 2017. It’s almost like China built lots of coal power plants, then disassembled them. That, or perhaps CO2 levels are controlled by plankton and have nothing much to do with human activity.

This is terrible news, […]

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) […]

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, […]

Abbott still leading — his “Direct Action” plan to reduce CO2 cheaply (without renewables) is back

Still leading the nation from the back bench

Scott Morrison wants to meet the Paris agreement and have cheap electricity. The have-cake: throw-cake-in-river option. How to resolve that dilemma (or at least have an answer for his Environment Minister, Melissa Price to give) — repeat the Tony Abbott plan.

“Direct Action” uses an auction system to find the cheapest ways to reduce CO2 — which obviously rules out intermittent renewables because they are wildly expensive. Abbott is painted as a denier, yet his plan was more effective at reducing CO2 than any of the Green’s schemes. Naturally this only makes the cult believers hate him more — because he threatens the cash cow for dependent renewables. He exposes how useless wind and solar are and thus, how most greens are hypocritical self-serving political activists who pretend to care for the environment in order to get rich, go on junkets, or pump their ego while they fly to skiing trips in Japan.

Direct Action back on the agenda

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

The Coalition will refocus environment policies on the Abbott-era Direct Action plan, including a rebooted Green Army and a reverse auction scheme to improve land management […]

Australia needs to sacrifice cows and sheep for Paris too

Everyone is talking about the NEG (National Energy Guarantee) which will supposedly attain the mythical trifecta of cheap, reliable, and planet cooling electricity. In terms of meeting our Paris “commitment” Tom Quirk wondered how we are doing in other sectors, like farms, cars, rubbish — and whether we had cut emissions there. Well, ho, ho, here’s that report. Thank you, Tom. Looks like a lot of cows and sheep will have to go. Still, we want to stop storms don’t we?

Key points: The NEG is not enough on its own to reduce Australian emissions from 608Mt to 444Mt. Most of our reductions so far have come from just two sectors: the electricity sector and from changes to land-clearing. We’ve “achieved” nothing in other sectors like agriculture, transport, waste and industry. Methane emissions from sheep and cattle amount to 60Mt. Trashing the live-export trade may help reduce

With enough bad luck, and poor management, plus some sacrificial lambs on the altar, we might be the only country on Earth that meets its Paris agreement. Rejoice.

This is assuming that our population stops growing and Australia blocks all immigration tomorrow. That’s right, Tom Quirk has not made any allowance for the […]

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 […]

Climate Unicorns downunder as Australians offer to cut CO2 by 50% per capita in 12 years

…

I’ve been saying the Australian commitment of a 28% reduction by 2030 was an economic suicide pact. Terry McCrann’s got numbers on just how suicidal it is:

The so-called NEG or National Energy Guarantee is dammed upfront by the total irreconcilability of its three aims: to ensure both affordable and reliable electricity (and, indirectly, gas) and meeting our commitments under the Fake Paris Accord to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 26-28 per cent by 2030.

This, not exactly incidentally, means we have to cut emissions per capita by closer to an economy-killing and individual-impoverishing 50 per cent, and do so, in barely a dozen years, thanks to our crazy-stupid “build another Canberra ever year” high immigration, for want of a better word, policy.

What were our negotiators thinking?

Nobody mention immigration. Australia has the fastest growing population in the West. China wants to use “per capita” calculations for obvious reasons. Australia doesn’t even want to talk “per capita”.

We cut our emissions per capita by 28% from 1990 – 2013, but that was done by stopping land clearing and by confiscating land from farmers, stealing their right to use their property, and jailing […]

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 […]

China produces the same emissions in 18 days as Australia does in one year

Oh the futility. Australia’s entire annual production of carbon from all that mining, construction, industry and everything is replicated in China every 18 days.

If we cut our emissions by an obscene, bleeding 25%, we will spend billions and yet China will undo all our hair-shirt “savings” in just 5 normal days. (And that’s at current rates, it gets worse by 2030).

Australia is a giant coal and iron quarry built at the far end of the Earth, with a tiny, but rapidly growing population spread across a vast land. Transport distances are eye-watering. We run 94% of everything off fossil fuels and there are no more easy cuts to be made. Gaia gave us more uranium than any other country but we are religiously opposed to nuclear power. (What would it take to change that — a bomb from China?). We’ve got more Sun, hot rocks and empty space than anywhere, so if solar, wind or geothermal were going to work on Planet Earth, it would be here. We are God’s Gift to the renewable industry — yet they all fail. (Today, Flannery’s Geothermal project crashed, last week Windorah’s solar farm shut, and last month, the whole state of […]

The USA — Fracking its way to jobs, wealth and lower emissions

It’s everything the Green revolution was supposed to offer — jobs, energy independence, money money money, and massive reductions in CO2. Australians hear how bad fracking is but not much about the transformation of the US. h/t GWPF…

The Black Gold Rush

Exploitation of new oil and gas reserves by fracking shale rock has transformed the US economy since it started just 11 years ago – creating at least a million jobs and slashing electricity bills and greenhouse gas emissions.

The scale of this energy revolution is almost unimaginable.

The Marcellus shale bed in Pennsylvania is thought by geologists to contain enough gas to power and heat every home in America for 50 to 100 years. Yet a few hundred feet beneath it lies another giant formation, the Utica, that contains enough gas for a further century. — Daily Mail UK.

Emissions from electric power in the USA are back to 1987 levels

There’s a message here about how Australia could meet its obscene 28% reduction targets for carbon emissions. A caring Greenie would say No to more gifts for windfarms — and get cracking on the fracking. (Do they want to save […]

JoNova

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

A God or a Government? Labor legislates climate fantasy and tech inventions too, all by 2030

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

CSIRO says we need to do pandemic type shutdowns every year to meet Paris

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

Save the world and raze some forests

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

Abbott still leading — his “Direct Action” plan to reduce CO2 cheaply (without renewables) is back

Australia needs to sacrifice cows and sheep for Paris too

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

Climate Unicorns downunder as Australians offer to cut CO2 by 50% per capita in 12 years

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

China produces the same emissions in 18 days as Australia does in one year

The USA — Fracking its way to jobs, wealth and lower emissions

JoNova

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