Coalition comments

Insights from the
NZ Climate Science Coalition

European heat wave June 2019

What climate emergency?

Articles in Business Insider since late June make outlandish claims about the European heat wave. Outlandish because they imply this was man-made global warming destroying the environment. It was nothing of the kind, just local weather systems producing temporary extreme temperatures. Continue Reading →

Visits: 102

Brexit – what cliff?

We are ill-served by our news organs with overseas news, and what we get on Brexit is decidedly pro-Remain, so I’m pleased to present this commentary from Melanie Phillips. She quotes a Whitehall whistle-blower who discredits the chilling Remainer predictions describing a no-deal Brexit as a “cliff edge.” My interest? Advancing the cause of free speech and seeing the welcome return of “the inventor of political liberty” to that liberty. As well, if a real Brexit is achieved, the UK will be more able to abandon the economic wrecking ball that is EU climate policy. Germany just joined the eastern states on economic grounds in refusing to commit to “climate neutrality” by 2050; what revolt might be next? The human energies to be released by Brexit hint at decades of prosperity for millions—we among them.

Phillips opens

As this Brexit crisis has degenerated into a nightmare, with Remainer MPs making their no-holds-barred attempt to block Brexit while the prime minister tries to force through her dreadful and dishonest snatch-Remain-out-of-the-jaws-of-Brexit deal, I have been very moved by the messages readers have been steadily sending me demonstrating that amongst the public, Britain’s indomitable spirit has not been quashed.

Continue Reading →

Visits: 167

Carbon price of coal shunts winter gas price higher

Bloomberg reports:

The highest prices for carbon credits in a decade have also lifted natural gas, discouraging power stations from making the switch away from coal. As a result, demand remains strong for the dirtiest fossil fuel in the continent that’s doing the most to clean up its economy. Coal prices as a result reached their highest in five years on Tuesday.

You might think the ETS impost on coal’s CO2 emissions, about twice those from natural gas, would give gas an edge, but you’d be wrong—rising prices for carbon credits have pushed up the gas prices too. The graph at right shows an eye-watering surge in the carbon price of about 400% over the last 11 months (although I guess 400% of nothing is still pretty small; so it could get worse). This financial punishment for the poor is a clear consequence of market interference by the climate justice do-gooders—nobody else has done this. The sooner they lose office the better, in the EU and everywhere. Continue Reading →

Visits: 460

Brexit polling as it happens

Early indications are the UK will leave the EU. But at 3:35 pm NZST it’s very close at 10,539,289 to leave and 10,066,155 to stay (difference 473,134). It could go either way.

UPDATE 4:15 pm NZST

Leave now 14,899,282 votes; Stay 13,905,623; difference: 993,659.

UPDATE 4:48 pm NZST

Leave now 16,285,959 votes; stay 15,154,925; difference: 1,131,034.

UPDATE 5:18 pm NZST

Leave now 16,992,701 votes; stay 15,812,943; difference: 1,179,758.
Leave must now win, and we await the final result.

 

THEY’RE OUT!!

Hurrah!

Visits: 163

Europe’s lunatics don’t want cheap green energy

Shanghai solar panels

Solar panels in Shanghai installed on a river or canal—plenty of those across Shanghai. Click to enlarge.

Bureaucrats slap tariffs on Chinese solar cells – incredible

Those non-elected, impossible-to-sack bureaucrats who “manage” Europe have lost their wits. While the rest of the world tries to hammer out a global agreement to reduce our emissions and thus “fight” climate change, these thickwits have slapped a 70% anti-dumping tariff on cheap Chinese solar panels. How mad can they get? Continue Reading →

Visits: 49

EU: strengthen energy, not useless climate targets

from The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Financial Times Deutschland, 5 October 2012

The EU Energy Commissioner opposes a tightening of the EU’s climate targets. Instead, energy policy should focus more closely on the needs of European industry. In Berlin, Günther Oettinger made jokes about the green “do-gooders” in his own party.

Günther Oettinger fears the decline of Europe if energy prices continue to rise and competitiveness deteriorates further compared to the United States and other parts of the world. He wants to convince his colleagues in the European Commission to introduce an industrial policy objective instead of new climate targets. At a meeting of the European Christian Democrats (EPP) in Berlin last night, Oettinger said the share that manufacturing contributes to the GDP of the economies of the EU should increase from currently 18 percent to 20 percent. Within the European Commission, he is fighting for a corresponding definition.

His appearance before a few dozen party members in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel was a day of reckoning with the EU’s energy and climate policies. Energy policy had long been climate policy, he said, but in the future it must be industrial policy. Continue Reading →

Visits: 346

Carbon War erupts in Europe

A battle of world significance has started quietly in Europe. Like all battles it is about energy, resources and ideology.

In the red corner, with a coercive utopian green ideology, is Germany, strongly supported by Denmark and Britain. This group wants to forcibly wean Europe off carbon fuels by replacing them with sunbeams, sea breezes and fermented food crops. They get self-serving support from places like nuclear-powered France, hydro-powered Scandinavia and geothermal Iceland. They are now proposing more drastic cuts in Europe’s usage of carbon fuels after 2020. Continue Reading →

Visits: 358

Forget global warming — Kyoto is about trade

handshake

When the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, the base year for calculating emissions was back-dated to 1990. They knew then that the ratification process would take many years (it was actually completed in 2005), so why did it hark back to the distant past?

EU

Two big European events occurred in 1991. As a result of the Soviet collapse, heavy industry had closed down in droves throughout the East. And North Sea gas came ashore in the West with a “dash to gas” displacing coal power in the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

At the time of the Berlin COP in 1995, EU countries collectively had enough past credits from the 1991-94 period to cover all the obligations they later accepted under the Protocol. It was a no-brainer for them to demand that other developed countries match the EU misfortunes during “the First Commitment Period.” Continue Reading →

Visits: 108

‘Fume permits’ perfect for fraud

Romanian houses

Some people, like NZ Climate Science Coalition energy spokeman Bryan Leyland, have been warning for years that the introduction of trading in invisible, unmeasurable, so-called “carbon credits” (or ‘fume permits’) is an open invitation to fraud.

Since 2002, Carbon Trade Watch has been keeping a close eye on the effectiveness of and criminal activity in carbon trading around the world. They wrote a good summary in April this year of frauds in the European scheme.

Now, we see the involvement of an entire country in “irregularities”, with Romania being completely barred from trading in carbon credits.

The Kyoto Protocol created a Compliance Committee (or Carbon Police), responsible for setting fines or deciding other punitive action when countries fail to meet their obligations under the Protocol.

The Compliance Committee has suspended Romania from participating in the carbon “market” because, they say, there are “irregularities” in Romania’s emissions data. The country was anticipating earning $US2.2 billion towards reducing its national debt from sales of carbon “offsets”.

The temptation to misreport the nation’s emissions and sinks is perhaps too easy, but one wonders what nasty political considerations might lie behind this severe and rapaciously expensive sanction (if the country loses the whole of the potential earnings, the fine is $US2.2 billion for what might have been an administrative lapse). One has strong doubts that the same thing happen to, say, the UK or Germany if they counted the invisible gases improperly.

Notice how emissions of carbon dioxide (with a few even less important gases) are demonised in this report from AFP by referring to the process as “pumping industrial gases.”

The scheme allows around 12,000 companies including huge multinationals to buy and sell rights to pump industrial gases into the atmosphere.

There has been a clever and very successful propaganda campaign to turn us against greenhouse gases.

Visits: 40

Fraud epidemic destroys trust in “carbon” trade

Handcuffs

Sends shivers down the spine, this does. For, not only does “regular” carbon trading take food from the mouths of mothers and babies, but fraudulent activities, increasing costs and therefore prices, take even more. How long before it turns up in New Zealand, if National really does launch its ill-advised scheme on July 1? The most important part of the story waits until the last two paragraphs, though I’ve flagged it in the heading. Further comments below.

First published by BusinessGreen, 30 Apr 2010

German carbon fraud investigation moves to UK

Prosecutors confirm that four arrests have been made in €180m fraud investigation

German prosecutors today confirmed they have arrested four people in Germany and the UK following raids on more than 50 homes and offices this week in connection with an alleged €180m (£156m) carbon fraud. Continue Reading →

Visits: 112

Diatribe in EU Parliament AWFWY good

Good grief!

I’ve just come across this video of Godfrey Bloom, Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire. He was speaking in Strasbourg during the debate on the outcome of the Copenhagen summit on climate change when he gave this furious tirade against the belief in global warming.

The surprise for us was that, near the end, announcing that the New Zealand temperature database was “fraudulent”, he suddenly brandishes a copy of our report, Are we feeling warmer yet? It’s a dramatic moment!

So how about that, then?

Visits: 344