Swiss parliament snubs European court climate ruling, dubbed “judicial activism”

Judges trying to punish governments for not controlling present or future weather is an absurdity ripe for knocking on the head. In any case, Swiss glaciers have advanced and retreated in the past with no input from the government or anyone else, so local climate variation is nothing new.
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BERN (Reuters) -The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted on Wednesday to reject a ruling ordering Switzerland to do more to combat global warming in a move that could encourage others to resist the influence of international courts, reports Swissinfo.ch.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued an unprecedented judgment that said Bern had violated the human rights of a group of older Swiss women, the KlimaSeniorinnen, by failing to tackle climate change.

But Bern’s lower house on Wednesday followed in the steps of the upper house and passed a non-binding motion with 111 votes in favour and 72 against blasting the court’s “judicial activism”.

David Turver: Labour’s Great British Energy Suicide Note

Introduction

This Substack has been highly critical of the Conservative government’s energy policy. However, we are now in an election period, so it is time to subject Labour’s energy plans to some scrutiny. On Friday, Labour announced more details about its plans for Great British Energy.

Their plans include many promises, but precious little detail on how they will be achieved. Labour’s central claim is that they will “cut energy bills for good” and they put some flesh on the bones by claiming in the text of their regional maps their plans will “save £300 off the average annual household energy bill”. Labour’s claim appears to be based upon a report by the energy thinktank Ember. However, it does appear they mean a saving on electricity bills, not overall energy bills.

Europe’s missing climate marches – replaced by tractor convoys?

Climate alarmists complain their manufactured hysteria pot is cooling down, as protest focus has switched to other issues and/or boredom set in as the novelty wore off. Instead the victims of dogmatic net zero diktats, such as farmers, drive onto the streets of EU capitals to air their grievances. Is a return to political reality anywhere in sight?
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Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections, Europe was rocked by massive climate marches, says Euractiv.

But as the 2024 elections approach, the streets remain silent.

As a series of climate marches swept across Europe in spring 2019, Brussels was no exception. At the movement’s peak, 70,000 people massed in the EU quarter to loudly demand greater climate action.

Landmark case crumbles: Swiss parliamentary committee rejects European climate ruling

Back to the drawing board for the climate miserablists and their litigious Swiss grannies, who had claimed a so-called ‘landmark’ victory after arguing their country wasn’t cold enough for their liking due to lack of government action, or something. The report notes that ‘the government had proposed stronger measures…but Swiss voters rejected them in a 2021 referendum’.
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GENEVA, May 21 (Reuters) – A Swiss parliamentary committee on Tuesday rejected a ruling by a top European court that said Switzerland had violated the human rights of its citizens by not doing enough to prevent climate change.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found in favor of a group of elderly Swiss women who took their government to court over its record on tackling global warming.

The decision, which was expected to embolden more people to bring climate cases against governments, indicated Switzerland had a legal duty to take greater action on reducing emissions.

Electric cars ‘twice as lethal for pedestrians as petrol or diesel’ – UK study

It seems electric cars just aren’t loud enough for public safety, compared to combustion-engined models. Predictably, EV drivers must expect later pedestrian reaction to their approach.
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Electric cars kill pedestrians at double the rate of petrol or diesel vehicles, a study in a BMJ journal has found.

Experts said that electric or hybrid cars were twice as likely to be involved in a road accident with a bystander than a petrol or diesel car over the same distance, reports The Telegraph.

The researchers suggested the vehicles’ quieter engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates and called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of net zero.

Russia finds vast oil and gas reserves in British Antarctic territory – what happens next?

Report: ‘Junior minister David Rutley last week told the EAC that his department had decided to trust Russian assurances it was just conducting scientific research.’ However, ‘reserves 10 times the North Sea’s output’ could be tempting – but not to most UK politicians, who prefer to import anyone else’s oil and gas in order to pose as climate friendly or something, while the government loses another court battle over its self-imposed net zero targets.
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Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK, reports The Telegraph.

The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.

Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the Commons Environment Audit Committee (EAC) last week.

Is Net Zero a poisoned chalice for governments?

The American title of the article here is ‘Europeans Ditch Net Zero, While Biden Clings To It’. Maybe an exaggeration as nobody has tried to ditch it entirely, even if some policy targets have been watered down, re-scheduled or even dropped (possibly). But the unreality of it all is at least beginning to make itself felt, as governments try desperately to pretend it’s all a great idea that just needs a few tweaks here and there, while ever more of their citizens feel the pain of it all.
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You know you’ve stumbled through the looking glass when European politicians start sounding saner on climate policy than Americans do, says the Wall Street Journal (via Climate Change Dispatch.

Well here we are, Alice: Europeans are admitting the folly of net zero quicker than their American peers.

The latest example—perhaps “victim” is more apt—is Humza Yousaf, who resigned this week as Scotland’s first minister.

That region within the U.K. enjoys substantial devolved powers over its own affairs, including on climate policy.

Electricity barrier: net zero climate policy means the UK housing crisis is getting worse

If there isn’t enough power for the new homes, where’s the power for all the soon-to-be mandatory electric vehicles supposed to come from? Net zero policy by climate obsessives is busy degrading the entire power grid to an increasingly part-time system. This is just one of the knock-on effects.
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Our inadequate electricity network is stopping the building of thousands of new homes. And the necessary move to low-carbon heating and cars is only increasing demand, says The Guardian.

Oxford has a severe housing problem. With house prices 12 times the average salary, it has become one of the least affordable cities in the country. Its council house waiting list has grown to more than 3,000 households, with many having to live in temporary accommodation.

An obvious solution is to build more homes, but those trying to do this face a big barrier: electricity.

UK Government defeated in High Court over climate plans – as usual

Time for yet another revised ‘net zero emissions’ plan. Whether any country that used to depend largely on fuel-burning power stations for electricity can meet the demands of its own time-limited climate plans/targets is open to question. The BBC report once again wheels out the old climate propaganda con trick of pretending that sunset shadow effects are scary pollution clouds in its report image.
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The government has been defeated in court – for a second time – for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News.

Environmental campaigners argued that the energy minister signed off the government’s climate plan without evidence it could be achieved.

The High Court ruled on Friday that the government will now be required to redraft the plan again.

In response the government defended its record on climate action.

Research quantifies ‘gap’ in CO2 removal – a climate target with no viable plans?

Having been told by the UN-IPCC that nature’s own carbon cycle isn’t up to the job any more, the manufactured problem for climate-obsessed governments seems to be the lack of any ‘carbon removal’ method that is (a) affordable and (b) effective, in terms of the scale of the supposed need. Such is the strange world of climate policy today.
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New research involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that countries’ current plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will not be enough to comply with the 1.5ºC warming limit set out under the Paris Agreement, says Phys.org.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organization UNEP has taken an annual measurement of the emissions gap—the difference between countries’ climate protection pledges and what is necessary to limit global heating to 1.5ºC, or at least below 2ºC [Talkshop comment – according to unproven IPCC climate theories].

The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports are clear: climate policy needs more ambition. This new study now explicitly applies this analytical concept to carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—the removal of the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, from the atmosphere.

Drought study raises tricky questions for UN’s climate loss and damage fund

What defines a ‘climate victim’? The impossible conundrum for the UN, facing claims for any climate-related disaster, is: would/could it have happened (to the same magnitude) anyway, for example due to natural factors or mistakes of some kind, regardless of unproven theories about possible human causes behind weather events? Eligibility for compensation depends on the answer, but funds obviously aren’t unlimited and nobody will readily accept a refusal.
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Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger.

But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses, says Climate Home News.

Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food.

“Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside his church last month.

The government and some humanitarian agencies were quick to blame the lack of rain on climate change.

Britain must spend £30bn to strip CO2 from atmosphere and hit net zero, experts warn

This ‘essential’ expense would likely go the way of HS2 and double or triple in real cost, with at least some costs continuing well after the target date. Absurd is too weak a word to describe this fear of a harmless trace gas essential to nature. CO2 is not pollution.
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Britain must invest [sic] £30bn in a network of massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere if it is to reach net zero, a government-funded report has warned.

The “direct air carbon capture systems” would remove up to 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year and then pump it into disused oil and gas reservoirs under the North Sea or Irish Sea, says The Telegraph.

Without such a scheme the UK will never reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050, according to the report by Energy Systems Catapult, a government-funded body that promotes innovation.

The UK’s Climate Change Act ‘faces a stress test’

So says an ardent fan of the idea of human-caused weather variations, who thinks UK climate laws were ‘once the envy of the world’. But unwelcome reality strikes in due course, because those in charge ‘underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are’. The article tries to make out that a bit more belt tightening will do the trick, which almost certainly underplays the pain ahead if the current over-the-top net zero policies are persisted with.
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The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily.

There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works.

The Stark Reality: Net Zero is a Tar-Baby

David Turver writes:

Outgoing Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark has been doing interviews with the BBC and the Guardian before his term finally comes to an end on the 26^th of April.

In his Guardian interview he seemed to suggest that all that was wrong with the Net Zero agenda is the name. He said, “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it.” He went on, “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

Climate policy fiasco: Scot Nats mocked for replacing flagship green target with ‘accelerated’ plan

Humza Yousaf is just another in a long list of politicians in various countries forced to backtrack on extravagant and disruptive so-called climate change plans. Attempts to reinvent their national electricity systems, along with numerous other energy-related interventions like mandatory electric car target dates, are proving a lot tougher to achieve than imagined when breezily announced. They all ignore the fact that nature relies on carbon dioxide to survive and grow. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “If you don’t like our climate targets, we have others.”
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Humza Yousaf and his Green coalition partners have been mocked after insisting they were pursuing an “accelerated response to the climate emergency” by abandoning a flagship greenhouse gas target, says The Telegraph.

The First Minister admitted that his government was scrapping Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 after experts warned it was unachievable.

He said it would be replaced by “an accelerated climate change proposal and plan”, including a controversial measure to impose a new carbon tax on large country estates.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said during First Minister’s Questions: “Only Humza Yousaf could believe that slamming on the brakes – because that is exactly what the SNP is doing this afternoon – is an acceleration.”

Europe is revolting against the tyranny of electric cars

As Scotland makes an embarrassing climbdown on its much touted ‘net zero’ targets, widespread problems with the big EV push due to public resistance are highlighted. Bad news for climate worriers and the EV industry, a glimmer of hope for nearly everyone else.
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The rest of Europe, Remainers like to tell us, is forging ahead into a glorious green future while Brexit Britain is stalling, the government backsliding one by one on its net zero commitments, says Ross Clark @ The Telegraph.

It is hard to square that narrative with what’s really going on across the channel. In March, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, registrations of new electric vehicles plummeted by 11.3 per cent.

In Germany – the grown-up country that’s supposed to show childish Britain how it’s done – the drop was even more precipitous at 28.9 per cent.

Photos of torrential Dubai flash floods show the downsides of trying to control the weather

The UAE’s cloud seeding operations worsened the Dubai flash floods according to this source. Would-be climate savers with grandiose schemes can take note.
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Summary:
— The United Arab Emirates experienced torrential rainfall and severe flash floods on Tuesday.
— The flooding was worsened by the UAE’s cloud seeding practice to address water scarcity.
— The weather modification method involves getting clouds to drop more precipitation.
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Torrential rainfall pummeled the United Arab Emirates this week, resulting in flash floods that have caused air travel delays, closed schools, and deluged homes, says Business Insider.

Dubai International Airport — recently named the most luxurious airport in the world — was diverting planes as of Tuesday evening until the weather conditions improved, according to a statement.

Swiss climate policy – a case of failing to do the impossible?

Phrases like ‘action against climate change’ and ‘climate protection’ are uttered without any clear idea of what, if anything, they might mean. Natural variation at all timescales is an ongoing process, but difficult to measure or predict with any accuracy. Warming has followed the lengthy Little Ice Age, but now some countries – even those with glaciers and ‘snow-capped’ peaks like Switzerland – are being saddled with a legal obligation to attempt to put the brakes on that, by swallowing the argument that a trace gas in the atmosphere is the main source of a supposedly solvable problem of slightly rising temperatures.
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Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped [sic] peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change, says Phys.org.

The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling last week highlighted a number of failings in Swiss policies, but experts stressed that the wealthy Alpine country was not necessarily doing much worse than its peers.

“The judgment made it really clear that there are critical gaps in the Swiss domestic regulatory framework,” said Tiffanie Chan, a policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science specializing in climate change laws.

“But it’s definitely not a Switzerland-only case,” she told AFP.

Net zero mania update: German transport minister warns of weekend driving ban

Unsurprisingly he gets accused of ‘scaremongering through absurd proposals’. But isn’t the real issue a blind insistence on the unworkable ideology of so-called climate policy that lies behind the proposals? Muttering about pollution is just a means of confusing people into accepting the argument that CO2 is a problem.
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Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed, says The Telegraph.

Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them. [Talkshop comment – carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant].

But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalition with the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.

Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year.

New coal plants in China ‘soar’, dismaying climate worriers

Obsessing about Chinese coal power, and its imagined effect on air temperatures, doesn’t stop the same people doing the obsessing from buying Chinese products made using that power, such as wind turbines, batteries and solar panels.
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China ramped up coal power capacity last year, according to new analysis, despite a pledge to “strictly control” the dirtiest fossil fuel, says Sky News.

The country added 47.4 Gigawatts (GW) of new coal power in 2023, more than double the amount added by the rest of the world combined.

It raises concerns that gains in clean power, including by China, are being undermined by the persistent use of coal, the worst energy form for climate change and air pollution. [Talkshop comment – CO2 makes zero difference to air pollution].