Energy crisis: The GWPF launches Net Zero Watch

Attempts to turn ‘net zero’ fantasies into reality are going to hit the public even harder than they already do, financially and in practical ways too. And all for what?
– – –
As the energy crisis in Britain and Europe worsens, it is becoming ever more evident that current climate and energy policies are failing, and the public is paying the price, says Dr Benny Peiser of The GWPF (Global Warming Policy Forum).

Net Zero Watch is here to provide serious analysis of naïve and un-costed decarbonisation policies.

Our new campaign and website will shake the tree; scrutinising policies, establishing what they really cost, determining who will be forced to pay, and exploring affordable alternatives.

At Net Zero Watch, readers (and subscribers to our newsletter) will be able to examine the full spectrum of views and critical analysis, enabling our readers to access a credible reality check of official and alternative climate and energy policy research.

Swiss climate experts propose personal CO2 budget

Credit: myswitzerland.com

Known in the UK as Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), this idea dates back to at least 2004. This is where ’emissions’ obsession can lead. Even your sausage buying would have to be recorded.
– – –
Swiss climate experts propose the introduction of an individual CO2 budget so Switzerland can reach its goal of “net zero greenhouse gas emissions” by 2050, says Swissinfo.

The radical proposal for Swiss climate policy was presented in the Sunday weekly newspapers Le Matin Dimanche and NZZ am Sonntag.

The central premise is that all goods would have two prices – one in Swiss francs and the other in CO2 emissions. This would factor the amount of CO2 released in everything from sausage making to short-haul flights.

German climate groups plan legal action against car giants

Image credit: autocarbrands.com

Climate lawfare is bound to get more popular if it’s seen that courts are willing to believe IPCC theories of how the global climate works. But that smacks of presumption of guilt, with carbon dioxide as the offender, surely?
– – –
German environmental groups on Friday announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW to force them to reduce emissions faster, emboldened by recent court victories in favour of climate protection, reports Phys.org.

Greenpeace Germany and Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said they have sent a claim letter to the three carmakers asking them to commit to more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, including ending production of fossil-fuel cars by 2030.

If they do not respond to the letter in the coming weeks and halt their “illegal behaviour”, the NGOs said they are ready to file lawsuits in court.

Information Tribunal orders Committee on Climate Change to reveal Net Zero calculations

Money down the drain [image credit: thisismoney.co.uk]

Show us your numbers! You have 35 days to do so, no more ducking and weaving allowed. ‘It is likely MPs were misled’ — strong stuff. Results due before the COP26 climate gab-fest.
– – –
The Information Tribunal has ordered the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to publish the calculations behind its claim that the UK economy can be decarbonised at modest cost, reports The GWPF.

The CCC’s figures were presented to Parliament ahead of the Net Zero emissions target nodded through in June 2019 to enshrine it in law.

The case was brought by Andrew Montford, the deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum.

The ruling, which dismisses almost all of the CCC’s arguments, comes after a two-year battle to obtain the cost calculations.

French Senate blocks referendum on climate change

Since when were French Presidents, or any other leaders, in a position to ‘protect the planet’ or alter the weather? The sooner such obvious nonsense ends, the better.
– – –
Reuters: The French Senate has voted to block a referendum promised by President Emmanuel Macron on whether to enshrine the fight against climate change in the French constitution, it said in a statement on Monday.

Macron had pledged to organise such a vote in response to criticism that he has not done enough to protect the planet.

The Senate, the legislature’s upper house, is dominated by the opposition conservatives.

In May, it watered down draft legislation requiring the constitution to “guarantee” the fight against climate change, preferring less binding wording.

Continued here.

Climate referendum: Swiss reject higher carbon taxes

Credit: myswitzerland.com

Democratic accountability can be a menace to climate obsessives. Suppressing and ignoring widespread disagreeable — to them — views is more their style. Looking at you, G7 leaders.
– – –
Swiss voters have rejected legislation at the heart of the country’s strategy to abide by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reports Swiss Info (via The GWPF).

The CO2 law was turned down on Sunday by 51.6% of voters. The negative outcome represents a major upset in the tiny nation that is disproportionately affected by climate change [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Switzerland’s temperatures are rising at about twice the pace of the global average [Talkshop comment – says who?] and its Alpine glaciers risk disappearing by the end of the century [Talkshop comment – empty waffle].

UK climate activist arrested after attacks on banks

Oxford Circus climate demo [image credit: London Evening Standard]

Even ill-informed, climate-obsessed attention seekers calling themselves activists can take things too far, it seems. Having already got away with various reported actions that most people would consider to be outside the law, tolerance is wearing thin.
– – –
LONDON (Reuters) — British climate activist Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion group, was arrested at home on Tuesday for conspiracy to cause criminal damage and fraud after her group attacked banks such as HSBC and Barclays, says yahoo!news.

Activists from the group smashed the window frontage of HSBC and Barclays in Canary Wharf last month and have targeted Lloyd’s of London as part of what the activists cast as a “Money Rebellion”.

‘Obscene’ UK windfarm subsidies revealed

Some electricity consumers may feel like muttering obscenities if they see the figures. Meanwhile the BBC insists renewables are now cheaper than coal.
– – –
The Global Warming Policy Forum has condemned what it called the “obscenity” of windfarm subsidies and has called for a complete rethink of energy policy.

GWPF research has shown that just six offshore windfarms are now sharing £1.6 billion pounds in subsidies between them every year.

Three receive annual subsidies of over a quarter of a billion pounds each year.

Federal auditors question viability of the German ‘energy transition’

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum & Die Welt.

While the auditors are piling on the criticism, the politicians are toying with the idea of producing hydrogen from solar energy in Morocco. That would surely be good for another upward twist to the already spiralling costs of the ‘green dream’.
– – –
The Federal Audit Office has accused the Federal Ministry of Economics of insufficiently monitoring the energy transition and of poorly managing it.

The auditors have now renewed this criticism of energy policy expressed three years ago in a further special report – and added an explosive analysis of security of supply.

60,000 Belgians take government to court over alleged climate inaction

Cue football stadium quips. We seem to be living in an age of IPCC-generated mass delusion, whipped up by the media, as far as the climate is concerned.
– – –
SOME 60,000 Belgians are suing the government for inaction in the fight against global warming in a case that opened today in a civil court in Brussels, reports thejournal.ie.

Launched in 2015 by the association Klimatzaak (the climate case, in Dutch), the procedure follows a similar one in the Netherlands that led to a ruling against the Dutch government.

The cases attack governments for not respecting the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Brits were misled about cost of Net Zero

Government estimates usually mean ‘not less than’, but this is worse than that. It’s supposed not to be possible to tie the hands of future governments on policy matters, but that’s what the Climate Change Act does, based on the notion that CO2 is ‘harmful’ – except for plant growth and in fizzy drinks.
– – –
Brits were misled about the cost of the Government’s net zero carbon emissions target by 2050 after Whitehall officials played down the estimated £70 billion annual hit, says The Sun (via The GWPF).

In bombshell emails released after a two-year FOI battle, Treasury civil servants admitted to then-Chancellor Philip Hammond that the cost of going green would likely be £20 billion a year more than the £50 billion figure they were told to champion publicly.

Technology Tease: On The Cruel Promise of a Renewables/Hydrogen Fuelled Future

.
.
Undermining reliable electricity supply is deemed to be sound policy by many governments. Their only escape route is to be out of office before the full force of such folly becomes only too clear to all.

STOP THESE THINGS

Gormless PM struggles to grasp his only solution to RE crisis.

The wind and solar industries were built on lies, run on myth and are fuelled by subsidies, so the only way forward is more of the very same.

It took politicians and punters around a decade to cotton on to the hopeless unreliability and chaotic intermittency of solar and wind power.  Which required an altogether new approach from the rent seekers’ spin doctors.

Over the last year or two, mythical mega-batteries have been pitched as the perfect answer.

But the economics clearly don’t stack up: the biggest battery in the world – that cost taxpayers a cool $150,000,000 – sits in a sheep paddock near Jamestown in South Australia’s mid-North and would power that purportedly wind and solar ‘powered’ state for all of four minutes when the sun sets and calm weather sets in.

Hardly bang for buck, particularly…

View original post 999 more words

France found guilty of climate inaction in ‘historic victory’

‘Hoist by their own petard’ springs to mind. French courts are now willing to hear from ‘direct victims of climate change’. How they might define climate change remains to be seen, as the insanity gets further embedded into the system.
– – –
A court in Paris has ruled that France’s government is guilty of climate inaction in a ground-breaking legal case, reports Euronews.

The decision comes after a group of NGOs, with the support of two million citizens, filed a lawsuit against the French government for failing to meet the country’s commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The legal claim was hailed as the “L’Affaire du siècle” or “the case of the century” by activists, who first started the dispute in March 2019.

How the UK Climate Assembly manufactured consent

No coincidence that Ireland and France also held similar climate charades around the same time. All part of the promotion of useless ‘net zero’ ideology.
– – –
This stage-managed Assembly is a sham, says Spiked-online.

There is no democratic mandate for extreme climate policies.

As I have been pointing out for over a decade here on spiked, the political consensus on climate change is not shared by the public – or, at best, the public’s appetite for climate policy has not been tested democratically.

And governments are well aware of this, too.

UK Climate Assembly was undemocratic–Ben Pile

.
.
Just as undemocratic as the Irish version, the French version etc. Funny how they all came up with the same idea at the same time…

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

London, 29 January: The UK Climate Assembly, which claimed to have delivered a mandate for a green revolution, could not have delivered a mandate of any kind, according to a new analysis published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.

According to the report’s author, Ben Pile, the Assembly was set up to deliver a preordained result:

Pile says that the Assembly was actually set up because the public were unpersuaded of the case for radical action.

The UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates can be downloaded here

https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/

Ben’s conclusion sums it up nicely:

View original post 59 more words

UK Government ordered to release Net Zero cost calculations

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Don’t mention the cost…this could be the funniest thing you read all day today. Any ‘official estimate’ is almost certain to fall short of reality.
– – –
London, 21 January: The government faces a major embarrassment after the Information Commissioner ordered the Treasury to release an email containing its official estimate of the cost of decarbonising the economy, says The GWPF.

In June 2019, some weeks after Parliament adopted the 2050 Net Zero target as law, the then chancellor Philip Hammond wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May, warning that her plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 was likely to cost the UK more than £1 trillion.

In his letter, the chancellor wrote that the costs meant that less funding would be available for schools, the police and hospitals, pointing out that Net Zero would render some industries “economically uncompetitive.”

Banning Gas-Powered Vehicles Means A Crushing Change For America

.
.
‘By my plan, by 2045…’ – insert ‘about two decades after my term of office has ended’.

PA Pundits - International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The election of the Biden-Harris ticket will, we are told, hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States. Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is how long before driving them is also outlawed? Well, incoming Vice President Kamala Harris promised that, “By my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only. 100 percent by 2045.”

President-elect Biden has promised in his two trillion dollar “climate change” plan [a major downsize from Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion Green New Deal] “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100 percent of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs).” Harris has called for this ban to begin by 2035, perhaps even sooner, if the momentum for change continues.

To jumpstart the transformation of the 99.5 percent of the…

View original post 923 more words

Command & Control: Subsidised Wind Power Central to Britain’s Great Socialist Reset

.
.
As COVID drains the national exchequer, plans to hose a few trillion pounds at the phantom problem of innocuous carbon dioxide molecules go almost unnoticed.

STOP THESE THINGS

As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.

But that colossal crony-capitalist boondoggle, is a mere snip by comparison with the £3 trillion that he’s planning to squander on an effort to completely remove carbon dioxide gas from the British atmosphere – well, at least the kind generated by all human activity, that is.

Andrew Montford takes a look at the numbers in order to get a grip on the cost of Boris Johnson’s ‘net zero’ CO2 plan for Britain.

Honesty is needed on the huge costs of attempting “net-zero”
Conservative Home
Andrew Montford
5 December 2020

Politicians can be divided into those who like to spend big…

View original post 900 more words

2020: The year of climate craziness

Climate laws have been passed by carbon dioxide fearing governments that won’t be in office when the due dates arrive. What happens if evidence-free climate superstition is still rampant when these legal requirements are not met?
– – –
BEFORE it even began, 2020 was already marked to be a year of climate hysteria, says The Conservative Woman.

It was the UK’s turn to host the annual UN climate meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow earlier this month.

Hence, the first eighteen months of Boris Johnson’s premiership saw the erstwhile ‘libertarian’ attempting to establish himself as a global pioneer of green policymaking: banning all that moves ahead of the conference, like some kind of overweight peroxide Ed Miliband eco-virtue-signalling on ‘our’ behalf.

The arrival of Covid-19 caused the meeting to be postponed, but this has not dented the government’s green ambitions to make the UK’s economic suicide the first in what they hope will be a global pact.

China steams ahead with weather cooking project bigger than India.

I usually avoid weather modification as a topic as it tends to bring out the ‘chemtrail’ theorists and other assorted window-lickers in force, but this is big enough to warrant an exception. So have at it Talkshoppers, does a project of this size have bad international implications, or are China using technology beneficially to reduce crop damage within their own borders?

This from CNN. As a concept, cloud seeding has been around for decades. It works by injecting small amounts of silver iodide into clouds with a lot of moisture, which then condenses around the new particles, becoming heavier and eventually falling as precipitation.

A study funded by the US National Science Foundation, published earlier this year, found that “cloud seeding can boost snowfall across a wide area if the atmospheric conditions are favorable.” The study was one of the first to ascertain definitively that cloud seeding worked, as previously it had been difficult to distinguish precipitation created as a result of the practice from normal snowfall.

That uncertainty had not stopped China investing heavily in the technology: between 2012 and 2017, the country spent over $1.34 billion on various weather modification programs. Last year, according to state news agency Xinhua, weather modification helped reduce 70% of hail damage in China’s western region of Xinjiang, a key agricultural area.