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Clark, I am not sure why you have taken that dismissive tone with me. I have been following this for a decade, I think I understand, quite a bit.
They just said on Radio Four that China will not be coming to Glasgow. China is deploying renewables, such as the dams but the Chinese Communist Party has issued orders for all coal producers in China to quickly ramp up coal production. China is the most prolific user of coal. The most important idea for the Chinese Communist Party is to stay in power, in control of China. For them, this means as close as possible to full employment, for while the peasants toil, they have much less time to think. If they are layed off, they will have time to think and may come to understand they are part of an experiment, like Brave New World, their individualism does not matter to the Party, only their compliance.I fully understand the dilema that Mr. Putin finds himself in, Russia is, these days, mostly a producer of basic materials but that is largely because Russia has thirty percent of raw materials.
Russia is keen to supply Natural Gas to Europe and also China but Natural Gas has to be moved, only two real options gas pipelines or LNG.
When the gas is removed from the ground it has to be sold and shifted, it is quite difficult to store, so Mr. Putin has made no bones, he wants people to sign up for long term contracts, then he can finance and build the infrastructure, what he does not want, is what happened in the U.S.A. with Fracking, a yoyo effect with idle plant and the laying off of workers, in short, he wants continuity of business.“World Coal consumption is projected to rise by almost 5% in 2021, with this growth driven by China (accounting for 61% of the growth), the USA (18%) and India (17%)”
The U.K. excavates and consumes little coal these days. Yes I understand that the Industrial Revolution was kick-started in the United Kingdom, the main energy came from Coal. We shut down Longannet in 2016, the largest power station in Scotland and one of the largest coal fired plants in Europe. We have done more than our bit in the U.K. Now is the time for the U.S.A., Australia, Poland, India and China to get realistic, if they do not want to drown or fry.
– “They just said on Radio Four that China will not be coming to Glasgow.”
Look a little deeper, beyond the propaganda intended to make us peasants demonise the Chinese government:
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+cop26
Reuters – “China’s Xi will not attend COP26 in person, UK PM Johnson told”, according to The Times, a Murdoch rag, quoting an unnamed source. Further down it notes: “Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has not left the People’s Republic since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic. He has joined video calls with global leaders.”
You have equated the leader with the government, and with the geography, and with the people that happen to have been born there, as you always seem to. If you have freed your mind of this hateful propaganda ploy, now please free your language of it too, so that you stop unwittingly spreading it. The BBC is rife with it, and thereby indoctrinates it.
And why is it Johnson, in particular, has been told this? More propaganda – next paragraph:
– “China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter so Xi’s absence from discussions – either in person or via video calls – would mark a setback for Johnson’s hopes of getting world leaders to agree a significant climate deal.”
“Johnson’s hopes”? As if the whole COP26 conference were Johnson’s personal project to save humanity! Johnson does little but lie, fornicate and burnish his own macho image by deploying aircraft carriers towards China. “Let the bodies pile high” said Johnson recently. “Take control of our borders” said Johnson, who refused to keep out SARS-CoV-2. His only plan for British emissions is a fat contract to Rolls Royce to re-purpose submarine nuclear reactors, which though it makes some sense is not nearly enough. These reactors are one twentieth the power of a normal power station; scores of them would be needed. That would be popular, wouldn’t it? And with so many reactors needed, Britain would use up its uranium stockpile in a decade or two and we’d be back to where we are now, but with a hundred more tonnes of radioactive waste and a load of obsolete reactors.
So what’s the Chinese government’s real objection, if they even have any and Xi isn’t just sensibly avoiding Plague Island Britain by using a video link?
– China and Saudi Arabia have failed to make written UN climate commitments ahead of COP26, iNews can reveal, punching a major hole in the UK’s ambitions to reduce global carbon emissions. Both countries, which are among the world’s biggest polluters, declined to submit updated pledges in time for the UN’s deadline this week to further reduce emissions ahead of the climate summit in Glasgow next month.
Ah, our allies the al Saud family, what a surprise! Maybe the Chinese government would feel more reassured if Western governments pressured the al Sauds for a change, instead of gifting them huge quantities of very advanced military hardware and the training to use it.
Michael – “the Chinese Communist Party has issued orders for all coal producers in China to quickly ramp up coal production.”
Yes, of course they have, or the country’s electricity will fail and masses will freeze, water supply and sewage pumps will stop and disease will break out:
– The emergency meeting underscores the critical situation in China. A severe energy crisis has gripped the country, and several regions have had to curtail power to the industrial sector, while some residential areas have even faced sudden blackouts. China’s power crunch is unleashing turmoil in the global commodities markets, fueling [shortages] in everything from fertilizer to silicon.
By far the highest emitting major country per head of population, and the country that has used the most of the total carbon that humanity can get away with burning, is the USA. The USA also repeatedly destroys other countries or subverts their democracy to control hydrocarbon reserves. To achieve this it runs the most invasive secret service and the biggest military on Earth, accounting for half of all military expenditure globally. That military is the biggest burner of fossil fuels and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases of any single organisation in the world. The USA is also the biggest importer of stuff manufactured in China – yet China is blamed for the emissions produced in its production. Yet somehow the USA’s emissions barely ever get a mention in our corporate media – except when Trump was president.
“Putin is laughing”, “China is wrecking the planet” – if you sounded a bit less like a propaganda victim, I’d be less inclined to dismiss. Maybe your style is parody of the corporate media, but that’s impossible to tell without intonation; you do seem to link almost exclusively to corporate “news”, and you seem repeatedly to fall for their tricks, eg. “Chinese military aircraft invading Taiwan’s airspace”.
All humanity is thirty years up shit creek together, we’re short of fuel and our boat is leaking faster every day. We either stop squabbling and cooperate, or we drown in shit. Together. So please stop seeming to cheer on the squabbling.
Clark
you made my day. What a good rant.
I was just checking and it looks like that
Eu 450 mill population + USA 330 mill population produce about 7.6 Billion metric tons of CO2
1.4 Billion people produces about 10 Billion metric tons.
MN is right Chines should go back on their bikes and bowl of rice a day while we reduce 250g steak to 225g.
MN this is great animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx85qK1ztAcMichael, another example of you apparently not reading others’ comments:
– “When the gas is removed from the ground it has to be sold and shifted, it is quite difficult to store…”
I have repeatedly referred to the UK gas storage facility at Rough in the North Sea, that Blair’s government sold off, and Centrica ran into the ground, which is why UK gas prices have gone up more than in the EU. Try this search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=european+and+UK+gas+storage
Or there are articles like this:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/mounting-fears-1970s-style-three-092842868.html
– The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7% of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands. Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former adviser to the Government on energy security, said: “It should be nearer 25%.”
– Data from Gas Infrastructure Europe show that the UK has less than nine terawatt hours of storage compared to 75 terawatt hours in the Netherlands (with a quarter of the population).
October 15, 09:26, #79578:
– “We have done more than our bit in the U.K…”
No, our government has plucked the low hanging fruit, they’ve done the easiest thing, converting from coal to gas. But burning natural gas still releases greenhouse gases. Some 15% of the gas simply escapes, releasing methane, which is several times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And methane is CH4 – one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms. So when it is burned, some of the heat comes from the hydrogen, releasing water vapour, but the rest comes from the carbon, releasing carbon dioxide.
Converting from coal to gas was only ever intended as the first step, a stop-gap while enough renewables infrastructure was built. Yes, other countries have to do more, all countries have to do more, and countries that industrialised earlier, notably the USA and Europe owe a debt to more recently industrialised countries like China because we already burned loads of carbon over previous decades and centuries, and it’s still in the atmosphere. Look at the graph linked below – each person in the UK still burns more fossil fuel than each person in China:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-per-capita
No country is exempt. This is an emergency because it has been left too long. Global emissions have to be halved emissions in ten years, and have to get to zero by mid century.
But China keep opening Coal fired power stations, U.K. is expected to open one new coal mine for steel making, as we want to hang on to steel making and ship building. U.K. is shutting Coal fired power stations.
The enormous expansion of the Chinese Economy, its death grip on manufacturing in most of the rest of the World, do you think this has happened by accident? No it is a plan by the Chinese Communist Party.
They want dominion over all of us. Fancy being controlled by the Chinese Communist party, fancy writing something bad about them, after they have control of you. They are consuming the World.What is your argument MN? Is it that China should just accept they will not be allowed to have the same expectations of energy use as USA/Europe/Japan? Do you think they will accept that? If you were them, would you?
“The enormous expansion of the Chinese Economy, its death grip on manufacturing in most of the rest of the World, do you think this has happened by accident?”
Chinese economic expansion was always going to happen, they have a population of 1.2 billion people, smart industrious people. Its grip on manufacturing is because WESTERN companies wanted to make more profit by abusing cheap chinese workers. When chinese wages catch up to western wages where will they exploit next? You praise the British efforts during the industrial evolution but see something sinister in China doing something similar in the modern era? Has China not a right to uplift its citizens?
Chinese government definitely has its problems but don’t you think the west’s government problems are just as grave?M N
those bloody Communist have a plan!Good to know you are resisting to best of your abilities but you will be swallowed!
Mr Trump was last hope! Start learning the Chinese national anthem!Michael, another thing I have mentioned that you forgot or didn’t read. The City of London is responsible for 15% of all fossil fuel investment globally. That’s between one sixth and one seventh – little 67 million population Britain funding fossil fuel equivalent to 1.2 billion people – hey, almost the population of… China!
ET is right; Chinese industrial expansion is caused by Western corporate outsourcing. Our computers, cellphones, voluminous plastics – you name it, we buy it from China, because it’s cheaper. Yet all those emissions are blamed on China, letting us off the hook.
Yes, China needs to reduce its emissions, everywhere needs to reduce emissions, but in total since the industrial revolution China has released just over half the emissions that the USA has, which is probably also about half the cumulative emissions of Europe – yet with more people than the USA and Europe put together.
So let’s sail some aircraft carriers at them, and supply Australia with nuclear submarines – that’ll show China that we want to cooperate, won’t it? And it’ll show that we’re not wastefully burning fuel too. Let’s accuse China of invading Taiwan’s airspace when they have done no such thing; that’s sure to get’em to trust us in negotiations!
“Our” news repeatedly tells us that China has the greatest emissions – which is true, so far as it goes. But how often does “our” news tell us that on average, each UK resident still emits more than each resident of China? Or that each US citizen emits nearly three times as much? Or that in total, the USA has emitted nearly twice as much as China?
Hardly ever – and never as a headline.
And that’s because it isn’t our news at all – it’s the news as the corporate system wants us to hear it.
The corporate system exploits the people of China, to manufacture the stuff to sell to exploit us. Then it blames China for the emissions. And where does it advertise all that junk? In the corporate media of course. It can’t depict things truthfully, ‘cos on one page the news would say “for your children’s sake buy less stuff” and on the facing page would be an advert saying “buy more stuff”.
The “news” is just bait, to get us to see the advertising. That’s the corporate media’s business model – selling audiences (us) to advertisers (corporations).
And don’t imagine the BBC gets off because of the license fee. It’s only in the UK that BBC programmes come without advertising. There’s a whole department called “BBC Advertising”. And all the journalists, editors and managers are recruited from media outlets that do carry advertising. The same is all true for the Guardian.
And look what happens to those who step outside this system, like Craig, and Julian Assange.
I am the Slime – Frank Zappa, YouTube, 3 min 34 sec.
It looks like Biden’s climate proposals are sunk, thanks to a corrupt Senator called Joe Manchin, Democrat, plus every single Republican.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/climate/biden-clean-energy-manchin.html
Not particularly good news, I’d say. It’s come out relatively recently that Manchin has substantial interests in coal. He had offered various ‘concerns’ with the size of the bill – $3.5T over 10 years, despite having no problems at all with, say, the Pentagon budget ($7T over 10 years). He also expressed concern over inflationary effects. But the chief concern was always the effects on his own wealth, should coal be entirely phased out.
Rotten, miserable, traitorous SOAB. How much money is enough for these people?
Glenn_nl, politics is fucked; time to rebel before our world is irretrievably fucked too.
It is ridiculous that such a matter comes down to the balance of one single vote; if politics and the media were remotely functional it would be an overwhelming majority.
It’s the same as the Trump issue. Why all the agonising about “Russian meddling”? Even if it were true, it would only have tipped the balance. The question isn’t “why did a minority swing their votes?”, it’s “why do nearly half of voters routinely vote for braggarts and charlatans? Could it be because their opposition are corrupt war criminals?”
“Why all the agonising about “Russian meddling”? “
You might be interested to read this article the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest pro Trump “fake news” operations in the US. It details how it was set up, organised and how easily it became effective strategy. I don’t know about the guys motivations in revealing it now. We have become too easily manipulated.
It would seem at present that there is a World supply side problem with Hydrocarbon fuels. Iran is a big producer of Coal, Oil and Natural Gas. Iran could make a BIG effort to supply the World but they are not allowed by the U.S.A.
“France is the European Union’s largest grain grower and exporter.”
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211014-rising-fertiliser-prices-may-prompt-french-farmers-to-switch-grain-cropsAnd there you have it, almost nothing to do with Brexit. Almost everything to do with World wide demand for Hydrocarbon fuels. If France, the largest agricultural producer in the E.U. is concerned by lack of fuel and fertilizers, then it is more pandemic than Brexit.
The U.S.A. has a lot to answer for.
They have been fucking economies and countries, at least, since the Second World War. They have been doing a lot of interfering in countries and those countries economies, perhaps if they desisted, things for the rest of us might ease, at least for a while. It would seem that the World desperately needs Hydrocarbons.
The USA is in the grip of mega corporations – as are most governments. It is true that governments need liquid fuel for their militaries, but the corporate system need all hydrocarbons for everything. It is those corporations that send the US government to war.
Humanity does desperately need hydrocarbons – but it also desperately needs to stop burning hydrocarbons. It is an addiction. The world should have started weaning off hydrocarbons in the 1980s when the scientific case became indisputable. But we didn’t; the corporate media lulled us into denial, just like a drug addict. So now we need to go cold turkey.
We need the remaining greenhouse gas budget to build the new energy infrastructure required for our future. If we waste it on fripperies, our addiction will cause us to wreck our only home. And then the hydrocarbons will run out anyway.
ACT NOW!
Sunday Express Quote
“The German government made the decision, not just to reduce their consumption of Coal to meet European climate change objective, but they also took the decision after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, to reduce their reliance upon nuclear power as well.
So they only were given gas and wind to produce their energy, and the one thing that Northern Europe has suffered from recently is a lack of wind.
That has magnified the problem and that bit is outside of the control of man.
We can’t control when the wind blows.”That is all correct. Fancy a newspaper telling the truth?
I do not like Nuclear Power, I like Hydro, I like Wind Power and sort of like Solar, not many other options left. Hydrogen currently seems a non-starter.
So, if we ditch Hydrocarbons, what in the short term will fill the gap?
It will not be Hydrogen. It will not be Nuclear. It’s not likely to be Hydro, large or small scale.
Does that only leave Wind or Solar?Clark
One can be a missionary and be idealistic and see with great clarity the solutions that have defied major think tanks, politicians, organizations and so on. But to change the world is not simple. The basic problem is that the dominant economic system is a capitalist one that is now on hyperdrive because the elite have discovered that you can run the world without producing anything worthwhile, but by just being rich. This renteer capitalism is now the predominant world system and there is no amount of tweaking that will change the impending car crash but by realizing that we just can’t continue to consume for the sake of consumption. Climate action and so on are all doomed because none of these actions will change the underlying power structure. I am not sure what will but it seems it will be nature that will solve this particular problems because intrinsic human greed will not allow any other solution.
SA, I completely agree, with that which you just typed. Upsetting, is it not? It does not matter what Boris Johnson or his latest bird want or think. The Chinese are hellbent on destruction, they are addicted to Coal, they are addicted to growth, they are addicted to control, including thought control.
We have invented and perfected Wind turbines.
We have invented and perfected Solar panels.
We have invented and perfected Hydroelectricity.If you combine all these three it amounts to about ten percent or less of the Worlds Electricity surply.
Come on Clark, how are we to make the 90 %?
Michael, we simply can’t ditch hydrocarbons yet. The transition to renewables has been left too late.
Natural gas is the best stop-gap, because (1) a lot of the energy comes from methane’s four hydrogen atoms rather than its one carbon atom, and (2) gas power stations can be started and stopped within hours – they can “follow demand”, and thus fill in when the wind stops blowing. Conversely, coal power stations take days to reach full efficiency, and a lot of heat is wasted when they shut down. Same goes for nuclear, as it goes; it just responds too slowly.
But Europe failed to ensure a reliable supply of gas. A better contract with Russia is needed, and more storage. Large storage facilities can be made from depleted gas fields, of which Europe has plenty – I don’t know how many of them are geologically suitable, but I expect enough of them are. This is all lack of planning and under-investment; the neoliberal dogma of “governments shouldn’t interfere – leave it to the market”. Doing essential things that markets don’t do is the purpose of governments, I’d say. A neoliberal government is like a chocolate teapot.
The longer-term, zero-carbon solution is continent-scale super electricity grids. The wind never stops everywhere at once.
SA, the climate crisis is less like falling off a cliff and more like walking into a minefield.
Extinction Rebellion has already had considerable success. It was after the April 2019 actions in London that the BBC stopped treating climate change as a debate – that’s big progress on XR’s Demand 1, Tell the Truth. XR rebels also glued themselves to Jeremy Corbyn’s front fence, prompting him to present his Climate and Ecological Emergency Declaration. It was passed by Parliament unchallenged. Since then, governments and local authorities all over the world have declared climate and ecological emergency. These declarations are more than empty words; they can and have been used successfully to challenge proposals such as new airport runways and road-building schemes.
Demand 3, for a Citizens’ Assembly was also acted upon, but the government gave it advisory status only, not legal power, and its remit was decarbonisation by 2050, omitting the halving of emissions by 2030 as the IPCC tells us we must do.
So, humanity is walking into the minefield slower than we were. That’s big progress, and XR are not about to give up.
Michael norton – “how are we to make the 90 %?”
Michael, I do not know. I think that for now, humanity will have to cut back on its energy usage. That is hard, because much of the world’s population uses far less energy than the nations that industrialised early.
A few points:
- The growth rate of solar photovoltaic generation capacity is phenomenal; it increased by a factor of over 900 from 2005 to 2018. But that shouldn’t be such a surprise because photovoltaics are semiconductors, and we’re in a semiconductor revolution. Photovoltaics have no moving parts and are the cheapest source of electricity, and the price is falling rapidly. Efficiency is still quite low, just over 20%, but a new photovoltaic technology made of perovskites could slash the price to one tenth while boosting efficiency to over 30%:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWU89g7sj7s – (14 minutes) - There are probably far better ways to do nuclear power, far safer, producing less than a twentieth as much waste, of a type that would decay to background levels in just 300 years rather than tens of thousands of years. However, very few such reactors have been prototyped, and none since 1970, so this would take decades to develop.
- “Come on Clark…” – But how humanity should best address this predicament is up to everyone, not just me.
Typically, representative democracy consists of people who chose a career of competing for power, so of course this system selects mostly competitive people. They stand little chance unless they join a major political party, and the parties oppose each other ideologically, so only two types of viewpoint are represented, only ideas acceptable within the party ideology are put forward, and at least half of these ideas go to waste, rejected by whichever side wins. The parties exist for decades, and the representative serve for most of their working lives, so both become targets for lobbying by vested interests. This is the system that has failed to address the problems for decades.
This is why Extinction Rebellion are calling for Citizens’ Assemblies practising Deliberative Democracy. A Citizens’ Assembly is a body of people chosen at random, like jury service, to form a democratic body. This system is called “sortition”; it was the earliest form of democracy recorded in history, that of ancient Greece. It ensures that all types of people are represented, not just those who seek power. The Assembly is informed by experts in the relevant fields, and they deliberate upon solutions rather than competing on party ideology. Members are rotated and replaced by new members also chosen at random, to prevent the Assembly being captured by vested interests.
This system has been tried and has proven remarkably successful. But the traditional parties won’t cede their power willingly, so we the people have to take action. If our current system is truly a democracy, then we have the right to do so. And if it is not, then it is imperative that we do so.
Clark
I, in no way underestimate the importance of what the various pressure groups are doing and the small progress achieved, but am just pointing out that all this is too little too late. Those who rule give us morsels of appeasement and allow just so much dissent but no more. When the world’s greatest polluting corporations invest in green energy and in many cases infiltrate and divert various movements, and when they purport to have ethical and climate aware policies and officers, it is merely to protect earnings, not the planet. What we are being offered is a soft sop, when we need a radical rethink of how we do things for long term benefit of humans and of the planet, and not for corporate profits as the creator of prosperity and wealth for the few. Nevertheless, I admire you and people like you who are proactive.
- The growth rate of solar photovoltaic generation capacity is phenomenal; it increased by a factor of over 900 from 2005 to 2018. But that shouldn’t be such a surprise because photovoltaics are semiconductors, and we’re in a semiconductor revolution. Photovoltaics have no moving parts and are the cheapest source of electricity, and the price is falling rapidly. Efficiency is still quite low, just over 20%, but a new photovoltaic technology made of perovskites could slash the price to one tenth while boosting efficiency to over 30%:
