All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

[Meandering]

Why is it everything they decide we "need" has to be subsidized for us to have?

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Electric cars are only as green as their power grid

President Barack Obama has just announced America's "first-ever national standards to limit carbon pollution from power plants." His "Clean Power Plan" calls for a 32 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.

Why? America's electricity is still mostly coal-fired, with natural gas being a close second and nuclear a distant third. The U.S. is second only to China, which is about twice as reliant on coal, in annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Norway, meanwhile, is almost entirely powered by water. Remarkably, 96 percent of its electricity is supplied by hydropower. In turn, its carbon dioxide emissions at about 36 million metric tons last year were just a fraction of America's, at nearly 5.1 billion, and China's, at 8.2 billion, per the International Energy Agency.

As for the cost of this electricity? Norway's household bills average about $149 per megawatt hour. That's 23 percent higher than America's, at about $121, but both are among the cheapest in the developed world, per the IEA. Indeed Britain averages $229 per megawatt hour, Germany $387, Turkey $189 and Korea $101, by comparison.

This all helps explain why a visitor to Norway today would see endless electric cars zipping around. It's as if Texas or North Dakota were buzzing with Teslas and Nissan Leafs, rather than gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs.

In fact, Norway just marked the sale of its 50,000th electric vehicle in April—months earlier than expected. To date this year, 1 out of every 5 cars sold has been battery-powered. Electric cars now account for nearly 3 percent of total cars in Norway, whereas they are a just fraction of a percent elsewhere.

This concentration has been fueled by heavy tax breaks, subsidies, and privileges for purchasing and driving an electric car in Norway. It goes all the way back to an "a-ha" moment—literally—in the late 1980s, when environmentalist Frederic Hauge's foundation, Bellona, and the Norwegian pop group a-ha (known for hits like "Take on Me") collaborated to promote the nascent industry.

At the time, policymakers were motivated by a mix of environmentalism and envy. Neighboring Sweden had a flourishing auto industry, boasting world-beating automakers like Volvo and Saab. Norway was trying to encourage its own fledgling electric industry, featuring Pivco (later named Think), a company whose electric cars were featured at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics in Norway, which was purchased by Ford in the late 1990s, and later sold and shut down.

Norway's electric car market lived on, however, getting a second wind as global leaders began to recognize and regulate fossil fuel emissions in an effort to reduce pollution, carbon dioxide and harm to the environment.

While the country missed the boat in terms of fostering a global electric car juggernaut, its hydropower grid is becoming a juggernaut of its own.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/11/electric-cars-are-only-as-green-as-their-power-grid.html

The takeaway from this article is twofold:

1. Electric cars are not achieving the reduction in CO2 as long as the electricity generation is from fossil fuels.
2. Electric cars cannot compete with fossil fuel cars unless tax breaks and subsidies are given.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Battery storage for solar power generation adds to the total cost of solar, not a reduction. The equivalent fossil fuel generation operates 24/7 with downtime for scheduled maintenance. Solar operates maybe 8 hours a day, except when bad weather sets in.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Many people have electric cars plugged in charging overnight, here. Why? It takes that long to charge the battery.

 

[Meandering]

Norway, meanwhile, is almost entirely powered by water. Remarkably, 96 percent of its electricity is supplied by hydropower. In turn, its carbon dioxide emissions at about 36 million metric tons last year were just a fraction of America's, at nearly 5.1 billion, and China's, at 8.2 billion, per the International Energy Agency.

Norway is much smaller and has much less population, so comparing on tons, as opposed to comparing on a metric based on population and size is misleading.

.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Norway, meanwhile, is almost entirely powered by water. Remarkably, 96 percent of its electricity is supplied by hydropower. In turn, its carbon dioxide emissions at about 36 million metric tons last year were just a fraction of America's, at nearly 5.1 billion, and China's, at 8.2 billion, per the International Energy Agency.

Norway is much smaller and has much less population, so comparing on tons, as opposed to comparing on a metric based on population and size is misleading.

.

Norway didn't have environmentalists stopping all dam construction for the past 40 years either.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Norway, meanwhile, is almost entirely powered by water. Remarkably, 96 percent of its electricity is supplied by hydropower. In turn, its carbon dioxide emissions at about 36 million metric tons last year were just a fraction of America's, at nearly 5.1 billion, and China's, at 8.2 billion, per the International Energy Agency.

Norway is much smaller and has much less population, so comparing on tons, as opposed to comparing on a metric based on population and size is misleading.

.

Actually, it is showing something most people overlook: Norway's population is that small, it does not matter how much fossil fuel they burn per capita, it won't matter in the scheme of things. The U.S. is dwarfed by China, India and the rest of the world on emissions so it won't matter in the scheme in things how much the U.S. decreases its emissions.

And, all this "renewable" classification of burning carbon is really fooling the stupid people; it does not reduce emission which absolutely is necessary to save the planet, so they say. That with carbon offsets for planting trees or carbon credits given to Tesla for producing battery powered cars that they can sell to polluters does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. What a joke.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Which countries are most responsible for the cost of environmental damages from global warming — and the billions of dollars they could be owing. CREDIT Concordia University

Montreal, September 8, 2015 — All countries have contributed to recent climate change, but some much more so than others. Those that have contributed more than their fair share have accumulated a climate debt, owed to countries that have contributed less to historical warming.

This is the implication of a new study published in Nature Climate Change, in which Concordia University researcher Damon Matthews shows how national carbon and climate debts could be used to decide who should pay for the global costs of climate mitigation and damages.

The countries that have accumulated the largest carbon debts on account of higher than average per-capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The U.S. alone carries 40 per cent of the cumulative world debt, while Canada carries about four per cent. On the other side, the carbon creditors — those whose share of CO2 emissions has been smaller than their share of world population — are India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil and China, with India holding 30 per cent of the total world credit.

“Thinking of climate change in terms of debts and credits for individual countries shows how much countries have over- or under-contributed to historical warming, relative to their proportion of the world’s population over time,” explains Matthews, study author and associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Geography, Planning and Environment.

“This paints a striking picture of the historical inequalities among countries with respect to their greenhouse gas emissions and consequent responsibility for climate changes.”

To estimate differences in national responsibility for historical climate changes, Matthews first calculated carbon debts and credits based on fossil fuel CO2 emission and population records since 1990. It was around this date that scientific knowledge and public understanding of the dangers of human-driven climate changes began to solidify.

Since that time, the total carbon debt across all debtor nations has increased to 250 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. And it’s still going up: the increase in world carbon debt in 2013 alone was 13 billion tonnes, or about 35% of global CO2 emissions in that year.

So what is the monetary value of this debt? “According to a recent U.S. government report, the current best estimate of the social cost of present-day CO2 emissions is about $40 USD per tonne of CO2,” says Matthews. “Multiply $40 by the 13 billion tonnes of carbon debt accrued in 2013, and you get $520 billion. This cost estimate gives us an indication of how much we could be paying to help lower-emitting countries cope with the costs of climate changes, or develop their economies along carbon-free pathways.”

Looking at the total world carbon debt, the numbers are even more staggering: the 250 billion tonnes of debt accumulated since 1990, at $40 per tonneFor the uninformed, represents $10 trillion USD. “No matter how you look at this picture, these numbers are really big — much, much larger than even the most generous financial commitments currently pledged by countries to help with the cost of climate adaptation and damages in vulnerable countries.”

Matthews also calculated how much each country has over- or under-contributed to temperature increases as a result of a range of different greenhouse gas emissions. By this measure, the total accumulated world climate debt comes to 0.1 °C since 1990, close to a third of observed warming over this period of time. Again the U.S. is the single largest debtor, and India is the largest creditor. Some countries, however, like Brazil and Indonesia, switch from being carbon creditors, to being among the climate debtor countries, as a result of the additional greenhouse gas emissions produced by deforestation and agriculture.

“This idea of climate and carbon debts and credits highlight the large historical inequalities with respect to how much individual countries have contributed to climate warming,” says Matthews. “The historical debts and credits calculated here could be a helpful tool to inform policy discussions relating to historical responsibility and burden sharing, by providing a measure of who should pay — and how much they might be expected to pay — for the costs of mitigation and climate damages in countries with lower emissions.”

What does this mean for the upcoming Paris meetings?

As countries continue to announce their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (or INDCs) leading up to December’s climate talks in Paris, it is becoming increasingly clear that these emissions pledges will not be enough to meet the international goal of limiting global warming to 2°C (see related research by Matthews’ research group published last month in Environmental Research Letters). The idea of additionally accounting for debts and credits would of course increase the burden placed on countries with high historical emissions. “But these historical inequalities are real and substantial, and need to be fully acknowledged,” says Matthews. “My hope is that this discussion will help lead to a stronger and more meaningful global climate agreement.”

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2774.html

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/7/075004

For the uninformed about the scheme of global warming, it is a transfer of wealth from the U.S. to other countries that would exceed $10 trillion. All based upon per capita accounting, of course.

The meeting in Paris is to get countries to sign onto the treaty that obligates those signing countries to pay. Of course the receiving countries will gladly sign.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

COP21 accord 'impossible without financial commitments'

There will be no agreement at the international climate conference in Paris in December if industrialised countries do not pay the 100 billion euros needed annually to finance the transition to renewable energy in developing countries, French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday.


"If we are to succeed in Paris it will require not only political commitment, but also financing," he said in a speech to French ambassadors meeting in Paris.

The pledge to raise that amount of money annually by 2020 “was a promise that already has not been kept,” Hollande said. “It is now a requirement. Without 100 billion, there will be no deal in Paris.”

He said the sum is “indispensable” to help poorer nations cope with extreme weather and rising seas, and to develop their economies cleanly - as promised by rich governments in 2009.

Group of Seven leaders were criticised in June for their failure to outline a clear path for increasing climate aid up to 2020, from the current level of around 30 billion euros per year.

http://www.english.rfi.fr/environme...t-financial-commitments-says-french-president

The U.S. is good for 40 billion euros. Taxpayers will never notice $44 billion more tacked onto the $18+ Trillion of debt.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

UN climate change body suffers mammoth European carbon fraud

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain -- while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study.

In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe’s commercial carbon trading system -- the largest in the world --thereby undermining that continent’s ambitious carbon reduction achievements.

The bulk of the fraud occurred under the battered Kyoto Protocol for greenhouse gas emissions, but researchers who detailed the scandal warned that without tough international policing and clear definitions of what every country involved in the climate deal aims to achieve, something similar could happen in the global climate change deal that world leaders are expected to endorse in Paris in December and that is intended to start up in 2020.

It remains to be seen whether those safeguards will be in place. Among other things, the emerging deal is based on what the U.N. calls “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs, that leave individual countries wide latitude for “estimating and accounting for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and, as appropriate, removals,” as well as how the countries themselves consider their INDCs to be “fair and ambitious.”

The most recent scandal -- there have been others -- involves the United Nations Convention for Combating Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body that oversees the Kyoto Protocol, as detailed in a 128-page analysis issued by the Stockholm Environment Institute, a widely-respected, Swedish-financed independent think tank whose authors staunchly support the need for a new climate deal.

But even international oversight, the report warned, “may not eliminate the potential for excess issuance of [carbon] credits,” and there is still the risk that countries could “hamper the strengthening of a crediting mechanism’s integrity.”

On top of all that, the report warns, U.N. deliberations on how to register carbon suppression projects under a new climate agreement still “resemble current Track 1 rules” insofar as countries that host the projects can still conduct the registration.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/0...e-body-suffers-mammoth-european-carbon-fraud/

Carbon credits and carbon offsets are vehicles for fraud. The end result is no reduction of CO2.

The logical reaction to a given country who has CO2 limits with cap and trade is to move industry out to those countries that don't have it and at the same time claim a carbon credit for doing so that is sold on the carbon exchanges.