EU Embroiled In €24 Billion Bogus Climate Accounting Scandal

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The EU is no stranger to audit problems and accounting stories, let’s say, and this one maintains the tradition. Pretending to ‘tackle climate change’ can be expensive of course.
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Brussels has been dragged into a bogus accounting scandal after it was claimed climate change spending had been overblown by at least €24 billion, reports the Daily Express.

The European Court of Auditors has questioned the European Commission’s claims about its climate-change programmes.

It was found the European Union’s powerful executive had substantially overestimated the amount it spent on preventing global warming through the use of clever-accounting.

‘Not all biomass is carbon neutral’, industry admits

This states the obvious of course. More carbon dioxide is emitted per unit of energy from biomass than from coal, undermining claims of ‘climate benefits’, and wood pellet production is energy-intensive. But ‘carbon targets’ mean the biomass obsession goes on due to lack of alternatives, given general dislike of nuclear power.
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Leading industry figures acknowledge that not all biomass brings benefits to the climate, insisting that only low-value wood and forest residues should make the cut under EU law, says Euractiv.

“Not all biomass is good biomass,” says Jennifer Jenkins, chief sustainability officer at Enviva, a US-based company which is the world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets used for electricity and heat production.

“We agree that not all biomass should automatically be categorised as carbon neutral,” Jenkins told an online debate organised on 29 June during EU sustainable energy week.

Money to burn? EU commission ‘invests’ €1 billion in innovative clean technology projects

This article ‘in association with the European Commission’ in effect tells us they are running out of ideas on how to progress their obsession with reducing the quantity of the minor trace gas carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. They forget the main player by far in ‘greenhouse gases’ is known to be water vapour, so focus on CO2 is next to pointless anyway, even if current climate theory was credible.
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The Commission is launching today the first call for proposals under the Innovation Fund, one of the world’s largest programmes for the demonstration of innovative low-carbon technologies, financed by revenues from the auction of emission allowances from the EU’s Emissions Trading System.

The Innovation Fund will finance breakthrough technologies for renewable energy, energy-intensive industries, energy storage, and carbon capture, use and storage, reports The European Sting.

It will provide a boost to the green recovery by creating local future-proof jobs, paving the way to climate neutrality and reinforcing European technological leadership on a global scale.

EU climate policy means exporting ’emissions’ to other parts of the world

Exporting jobs as well, in pursuit of their ‘climate ambition’ aka fantasy. EU voters should be careful what they wish for.
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The EU has an ambition of being climate neutral in 2050, says Science Daily.

It is hoped that this can be achieved through a green transition in the energy sector and CO2-intensive industries, as well as through altered consumer behavior such as food habits and travel demands among the EU population.

However, should the EU implement its most ambitious decarbonization agenda, while the rest of the world continues with the status quo, non-EU nations will end up emitting more greenhouse gases, thereby significantly offsetting the reductions of EU emissions.

Investors blast EU’s omission of oil and gas from a definition of fossil fuels

Is this a COVID-19 effect? Economic recovery with oil and gas demonised might be even more difficult than necessary, but cries of ‘energy sources incompatible with Paris goals’ can be heard from climate fearmongers.

Investors, politicians and campaigners have hit out at EU regulators’ “ludicrous” exclusion of oil and gas from a definition of fossil fuels, arguing it will lead asset managers to understate their environmental risks, reports The Conservative Investor Daily.

Under draft proposals for the EU’s sustainable disclosure regime, the European authorities responsible for banking, insurance and securities markets define fossil fuels as only applying to “solid” energy sources such as coal and lignite.

This means asset managers and other financial groups would have to follow tougher disclosure requirements for holdings in coal producers than for oil and gas company exposure.

German car industry calls on EU to drop tighter CO2 emission targets

Image credit: autocarbrands.com

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

The public turns out not be persuaded by EU bureaucrats that expensive short-range BEVs with high depreciation, limited recharge options and uncertain battery life are the way to go. And the current virus situation only reduces spending power, leaving car makers with nowhere to go but down as massive fines for missing absurd CO2 targets begin to bite.
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The German car industry is calling for stricter EU climate requirements to be overturned or to be delayed as car sales plummet to lowest level in nearly three decades.

It has urged the government to back them in efforts to make the European Union drop a planned tightening of emission limits on cars, reports Süddeutsche Zeitung.

China extracts record amount of natural gas from ‘fire ice’ in South China Sea

Burning hydrate [image credit: US Office of Naval Research]

H/T The GWPF

The main obstacle to the massive but untapped energy resource of gas hydrate is cost of extraction, once technical problems are mastered.

We might be sitting on enough gas to power the world for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, says OilPrice.com.

In a world awash in oil and gas, you’d think it couldn’t get any worse. Well, it can: China just announced that it had extracted a record amount of what has been poetically called fire ice. It is, however, a form of natural gas trapped in frozen water.

At 861,400 cubic meters, this record might not be a whole lot of gas, but it may well be the start of something new, and gas producers may not like this ‘something’.

Coronavirus throws EU’s Green Deal into disarray

H/T The GWPF

Less money available to waste on absurd and costly schemes for climate obsessives? What a shame – not. A harsh new reality has arrived.
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Much remains uncertain as the effects of the Coronavirus ravage economies, says Dave Keating @ Forbes.

But what seems clear is that any assumptions made about transitioning to the green economy have now been rendered obsolete.

[…] The EU’s Green Deal, with its target to completely decarbonize by 2050 proposed earlier this month, has not taken the massive economic and social disruption of Coronavirus into account.

Assumptions made just a few weeks ago will now have to be completely revised. There is particular urgency to revise the EU’s medium-term goal of reducing emissions by 40% by 2030, adopted in 2014.

EU Green Deal Should Be Canceled Because of Coronavirus, Czech PM Says

Not much chance of that in the absurdly climate-obsessed EU, but maybe a popular view in his home country given the massive costs and lack of worthwhile benefits of said ‘deal’.

Will COVID-19 be a reason to accelerate or slow Europe’s energy transition? The battle lines are already being drawn, says green Tech Media.

The Czech Republic’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, has said the European Union should abandon its Green Deal and focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus in an early sign of policy battles ahead.

Announced in December, Europe’s Green New Deal seeks to invest €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) on the road to making the EU economy net-zero carbon by 2050.

EU wants battery autonomy, but first it needs energy-intensive graphite

Typical electric car set-up

Expensive energy-intensive processes are needed to make a key battery ingredient for electric vehicles. How does this make any sense at all? They talk about the factories needed ‘to meet homegrown demand’ – but where is it?

As Europe looks to declare its tech independence by becoming a leader in next-generation batteries, it will have to start by making its own graphite, says TechXplore.

The problem is, nearly all of it now comes from Asia, mainly China.

So France’s Carbone Savoie and Germany’s SGL Carbon, the only European firms deemed capable of taking up the challenge, have been corralled into an ambitious battery alliance launched by Brussels last year.

“Thank you for bringing us on board this ‘Airbus for batteries,’ though to be honest, we weren’t even on the passenger list,” Carbone Savoie’s chairman Bruno Gastinne told France’s deputy finance minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher on Thursday.

Automakers face tough new standards in EU, starting now

Typical electric car set-up

Welcome to the EU’s plan to strong-arm its way to victory in the electric car game, in the name of imaginary climate benefits. What happens if the manufacturers all start posting heavy losses due to poor EV sales, as a result of this coercion, is not yet clear. As the article says, tens of billions of euros are at stake.

Long-awaited light-duty vehicle emission rules will hit light-duty vehicle makers working in EU member countries on January 1, and automakers will soon have to deal with the consequences, says OilPrice.com.

Vehicle manufacturers will have to sell many more hybrid and electric vehicles or pay costly fines, a situation similar to China’s rules.

For automakers with product lineups with few EV offerings, they’ll need to sell lots of conventional cars and trucks, and use the profits to pay the fines.

Industry analysts expect plug-in hybrid, battery electric vehicle, and hybrid vehicle sales to soar in the near future.

EU mega-subsidies for electric battery push

What could possibly go wrong? The German Economy Minister described the 3.2 billion euro handout as “a great success for Germany and Europe”. But what else could he say, as such a vast sum of taxpayer cash disappears in the name of climate ideology?

The EU’s powerful anti-trust authority on Monday approved billions of euros in subsidies from seven member states as Europe seeks to make up lost ground in batteries, reports TechXplore.

The EU’s powerful anti-trust authority on Monday approved billions of euros in subsidies from seven member states as Europe seeks to make up lost ground in batteries.

The move is part of a big push led by Germany and France to prepare Europe for the emergence of electric cars, as gas combustible engines are phased out over climate change concerns.

Absurd EU to declare climate emergency while forcing MEPs to travel to France every month

Gone to Strasbourg for a few days

H/T The GWPF

It’s ‘do as we say, not as we do’ time again for the climate-obsessing fake virtue signallers in Brussels – or is it Strasbourg just now?

Members of the European Parliament will this week vote on whether to declare a “climate emergency” – after moving thousands of staff and their whole operation from Brussels to Strasbourg, reports the Daily Express. 

In a monthly act of environmental damage, the EU Parliament ups sticks and moves from its regular home in Belgium to the French town for a week of debate.

Sorry Ryanair, there’s no such thing as a green airline

More promotion of the mythical virtues of a ‘low-carbon’ lifestyle, which is somehow supposed to be ‘environmentally friendly’. Of course in the real world the natural environment depends on carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, but who wants to hear that in these days of climate fearmongering?

The Irish airline has released a series of adverts flaunting its green credentials, but it’s still the EU’s tenth-biggest polluter.

The solution? Reducing demand, suggests Wired.

Of the European Union’s ten biggest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitters, nine of them are coal-fired power plants. The tenth is Ryanair, the low-cost Irish airline which released 9.9 megatonnes of greenhouse gases in 2018 – a 6.9 per cent increase from 2017.

Trade rules emerge as weapon to fight climate change in Europe

The EU hopes to bully any country or enterprise that doesn’t want to conform to its dubious ‘man-made climate’ obsessions and policies. What could possibly go wrong?

The European Union is poised to bring trade policy into the fight against climate change, a move that risks stoking global commercial tensions, says Phys.org.

European Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen wants to craft a carbon border tariff for the EU, the world’s biggest single market, as part of a Green Deal to battle the more frequent heat waves, storms and floods tied to global warming.

The idea would unleash a major policy weapon that may well be too politically controversial to work. Even so, elevating the issue is likely to trigger a broader debate within the EU about how to protect domestic businesses from lower-cost competitors abroad.

EU plans to spend more on private jets for top officials

It’s the old ‘do as we say, not as we do’ routine again. What about those supposedly naughty emissions? Hollow laughs all round.

Move comes despite pledges to do more to cut emissions, says Politico.
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The European Union is planning to spend millions of euros more on private jet flights for its top officials — just as it is proclaiming its green credentials and pledging to step up the fight against climate change.

The bloc has raised the amount that can be spent under a five-year contract for “air taxi” flights by more than €3.5 million, according to a document published this month in the EU’s tenders database.

The Green Paradox: Why Europe’s climate policies increase global CO2 emissions

German coal operation

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Government attempts to interfere in power generation markets can and do have unintended consequences, including undermining their own intentions. The expert interviewed here says ‘eight times as many wind and solar power plants as today’ would be needed in Germany by 2050, to meet policy targets. Many of the obstacles that lie in the way also apply to other countries that want to pursue the ‘CO2 controls climate’ delusion.

German economist Johannes Bachmann explains the so-called ‘Green Paradox’ — when unilateral climate policies accelerate the worldwide extraction of fossil fuels and global CO2 emissions.
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Yesterday, 20 September, the so-called “Climate Cabinet” of Germany’s federal government met to set the course of German climate policy for the coming years. Christoph Kramer spoke with Johannes Bachmann about the so-called Green Paradox and the economic concepts that fuel it.

Dr Bachmann is an economist and a member of the Hayek Society. Two years ago he received his doctorate from Michael Bräuninger, a Hamburg economist and former research director of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI). In his dissertation Bachmann dealt with the effect of climate policy measures on CO2 emissions.

Christoph Kramer: Mr. Bachmann, if one looks into your dissertation as a layman it’s all Greek to me. Could you please briefly explain exactly what the thesis is about and what methodology you used?

Johannes Bachmann: I can well understand that. On the one hand, there are quite a few technical terms in the work, and on the other, there are many formulas. It is a typical dissertation: a work by an academic for academics.

The aim of the thesis was to examine the effects of climate policy measures on the supply side of fossil fuels. To this end, I calculated how owners of raw materials adjust their production quotas as a result of CO2 taxes or subsidies for renewable energies in order to continue generating as much revenue as possible. Why did I focus on the supply side of all things? The answer is: the quantity of fossil fuels that is extracted from the earth is also consumed.

European Green Deal portfolio handed to EU vice president, in major elevation

Money to burn?

A major elevation of the delusion of having some control over the weather, that is. Looks like evr more vast sums of money will have to poured down the drain before anyone notices it’s not having any effect on the climate, if they ever do notice.

Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans has been named executive vice president responsible for strategy to make the EU climate neutral by 2050, reports Climate Home News.
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Climate action is getting a promotion in the next European Commission, with the portfolio assigned to one of three executive vice presidents.

Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans was nominated on Tuesday to develop the “European green deal” over the next five years. He is to directly manage the climate change directorate (DG Clima) and coordinate efforts across agriculture, health, transport, energy, cohesion and environment.

Announcing the line-up in a webcast press conference, commission president Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted to create a “flexible, agile” team to deliver on the bloc’s priorities.

UK To Impose A Competitive Carbon Tax After No-Deal Brexit

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

A hint of commonsense in post-Brexit climate policy, if or when we get there? So-called ‘carbon’ taxes may well be a pointless nonsense, but if one has to be endured then the lower the better.

The United Kingdom is set to impose a £16 per ton tax on carbon if it leaves the European Union without a deal on October 31, according to government plans, reports The GWPF (from Forbes).

If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, it will also leave the EU’s Emissions Trade System (ETS), the centrepiece of the bloc’s efforts to meet European countries’ emissions reduction obligations.

EU destroys 700,000 hectares of rainforest for biofuels

H/T The GWPF

All those trees would have absorbed large amounts of the carbon dioxide they claim to be so scared of. Somehow all this is deemed to be ‘sustainable’, using the climate excuse.

The EU wants to save our climate with supposedly green biofuels and has deemed palm oil “sustainable”. Yet on the other side of the globe, rainforests are being clear-cut to produce the 1.9 million tons of palm oil that end up in European fuel tanks every year, says Rainforest Rescue.

The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels”.

Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.

The plantations needed to satisfy Europes’s demand for palm oil cover an area of 700,000 hectares – land that until recently was still rainforest and the habitat of 5,000 endangered orangutans. Despite the clear-cutting, the EU has classified palm oil as sustainably produced.

This policy has now blown up in the legislators’ faces, with scientists confirming what environmentalists and development experts have long asserted: biofuels help neither people nor the environment – and they are most certainly not climate-neutral, as even studies commissioned by the EU show.