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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

Investors Are Backing Uranium For Reliable Emission Free Electricity – OpEd – by Ronald Stein (Eurasia Review – June 29, 2021)

https://www.eurasiareview.com/

Ronald Stein is Founder and Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure of PTS Advance, headquartered in Irvine, California.

As a reaffirmation of what Abraham Lincoln said back in 1858, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”, investors are not being fooled by the rhetoric that weather can provide for our electricity needs.

Share prices in uranium miners are on the rise, much to the horror of the weather dependent wind and solar industries.

The market seems to be taking the threat of looming net-zero emissions targets seriously. Knowing that the only serious measure of meeting any such target is nuclear power, the smart money is backing any company with uranium mining interests or even the mere prospect of developing such an interest.

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Move to net zero ‘inevitably means more mining’ – by Jonathan Amos (BBC.com – May 24, 2021)

https://www.bbc.com/

The public will need to accept greater mining activity if the world is to meet the challenge of going green.Resource experts say the current supply of various metals and minerals cannot support a global economy producing net zero carbon emissions.

Extraction rates have to be raised, the scientists argue, if only in the short term. Eventually, large-scale recycling should be able to satisfy the demand for key commodities such as lithium.

New mining initiatives are often met with resistance because of the negative impacts they can have on the wider environment and on health. And some activities have drawn particular ire because they’ve become associated with labour abuses.

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Clubs of Doom and the Limits to Models – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – June 25, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Junk Science Week: Global politicians claim to set climate policy based on ‘the science.’ But the science is driven by ‘the politics’

In November the world’s nations will meet in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26).

It is set to become the most important political event of the year and maybe the decade or — who knows, the century — as more than 100 nations attempt to create a globalist agreement to reshape the planet’s economy to meet the dictates of climate change science.

Alok Sharma, the British president of COP26, summarized the summit’s objectives: “To keep the temperature of the planet under control — limiting its increase to 1.5 degrees — the science dictates that by the second half of the century, we should be producing less carbon than we take out of the atmosphere. This is what reaching ‘net zero’ means.”

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Coal-Loving Australia Rejects Green Hub on Environment Risks – by Heesu Lee (Bloomberg News – June 21, 2021)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) One of the world’s biggest fossil fuels exporters rejected a proposal to build a massive renewable energy hub over concern about its environmental impact.

The Asian Renewable Energy Hub, which planned 26-gigawatts of wind and solar generation to produce hydrogen and ammonia, would have disrupted tidal movements and impacted the habitats and lifecycle of native species, according to a statement from Australia Environment Minister Sussan Ley’s office.

While scrutiny of mining and energy projects has intensified after the destruction of indigenous sites in Western Australia by Rio Tinto Group, the rejection of the green hub sparked criticism that leaders in Canberra favor fossil fuel projects.

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Aluminum industry faces big decarbonization challenges — report – by Staff (Mining.com – June 16, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

A new report by Wood Mackenzie analyzes the challenges and opportunities that the future presents for aluminum, as the buildout of low-carbon energy supply and transmission will consume vast quantities of primary aluminum and associated alumina and bauxite.

Although such a forecast seems to be rosy, the market analyst says that the metal’s role in the green economy may be dampened by the fact that the industry will have to secure low-carbon power, which itself requires the use of low-carbon aluminium, among other metals.

“On a global basis, power accounted for close to 60% of greenhouse gas emissions relating to aluminum production in 2020,” the report reads, pointing out that the primary aluminum industry accounted for around 2.6% of global GHG emissions in 2020, of which 70% came from China.

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Yet another nail in the coffin of Canada’s energy industry – by Lorne Gunter (Toronto Sun – June 12, 2021)

https://torontosun.com/

Coal produces “unacceptable environmental effects.” Plastic is “toxic.” The oilsands should be “phased out” and pipelines aren’t worth fighting for (except, of course, for the ones that bring gasoline, propane and other fuels to Ontario and Quebec right before a federal election).

With an announcement Friday that Ottawa was effectively proclaiming federal jurisdiction over all thermal coal-mining projects, so the feds could protect fish and Indigenous people, the Trudeau government has hammered yet another nail in the coffin of Canada’s energy industry.

Just how do the federal Liberals propose to fund their Great Reset without the revenues from Canada’s resource industries, let alone heat and light every home in the country, fuel every truck that delivers food to grocery stores, and power greenhouses, factories and public transit?

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Taking a less alarmist view on climate change – by Derek H. Burney (National Post – May 20, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

Canada should take a more pragmatic approach that focuses both on environmental concerns and measures that will bolster, not retard, our economic prospects

Given the Supreme Court verdict validating the Liberals’ carbon tax and the awkward manoeuvre by Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole to emulate a “carbon pricing plan,” one would think the political debate about climate change is over in Canada.

But wait a minute. There are some myths to challenge and some other views to consider and evaluate. Many Canadians see their country as being in the vanguard of those committed to assuage what is widely proclaimed as an “existential threat” to the world.

And yet, despite the implementation of an increasingly costly carbon tax, Canada is, as Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and an ardent climate change advocate, has bluntly pointed out, “the only G7 country where carbon emissions have increased since the signing of the Paris Agreement (in 2015).” The carbon tax has not delivered and yet the economic costs to many Canadians are growing.

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Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won’t be pleasant – by Peter Foster (National Post – June 5, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

What Carney ultimately wants is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism

In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding.

Carney’s views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.”

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Dispute Over a Coal Industry Pits Poland Against Its Neighbors – by Andrew Higgins (New York Times – May 30, 2021)

https://www.nytimes.com/

BOGATYNIA, POLAND — The huge hole in the ground, dug ever deeper and wider by generations of Polish strip miners feeding their country’s voracious appetite for coal, has devoured a dozen villages and nibbled away at land and homes in a 19th-century spa town on its rim.

The hole has grown so big, sucking in water from miles around, that wells over the border in the Czech Republic are running dry, local residents say.

Michael Martin, a German train driver who lives in a Czech village across the border from the Polish mine, said the well in his garden, previously his main source of water, is now nearly dry and he runs a pipe to a deeper communal well more than 100 yards away.

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Make climate policy in legislatures, not courts – by Bjorn Lomborg (Financial Post – May 25, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Climate court cases undermine democracy, harm the poor and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate

Despite intense climate worries, electorates have been unwilling to spend the trillions needed to cut emissions dramatically. That is why climate campaigners have increasingly pursued a new strategy: forcing climate policy through courts.

Across the world, the UN now counts at least 1,550 such climate cases in 38 countries, including several in Canada, often filed by young people invoking a fear for their future.

Unfortunately, such cases undermine democracy, harm the poor and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate.

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What we need to know about the pace of decarbonization – by Vaclav Smil (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy – April 2020)

https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/

University of Manitoba professor Vaclav Smil is regarded as an international authority on the history of energy transitions. Science Magazine calls him “the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy.” In the words of Bill Gates “there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.”

Energy transitions have been among the key defining processes of human evolution. The first millennia-long transition was from the reliance on traditional biofuels such as wood, charcoal, crop residues and animate sources of energy derived from human and animal muscles, to increasingly common reliance on inanimate energy converters. They included water wheels, wind mills and better harnessed draft animals for fieldwork and transportation.

Transition to fossil fuels to produce heat, thermal electricity and kinetic energy began in England during the 16th century. It took hold in Europe and North America only after 1800, and in most of Asia only after 1950.

This transition has been accompanied by increasing reliance on primary electricity, dominated by hydroelectricity since the 1880s, with nuclear generation contributing since the late 1950s. The transition from traditional biofuels to fossil fuels has resulted in gradual relative decarbonization, but also in enormous growth in absolute emissions of CO2.

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What Impact Will India’s ‘Clean Energy’ Shift Have on Its Minerals Economy? – by Lou Del Bello (Science The Wire India – May 12, 2021)

https://science.thewire.in/

Despite what we often hear, the energy transition is not as simple as building solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. It requires an overhaul of some of the key systems underpinning our economy, minerals being one of them.

In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) takes stock of which and how much mineral resources we’ll need as we decarbonise the world’s energy architecture.

I spoke with Jagabanta Ningthoujam, manager with RMI-India, who specialises on electricity, batteries and hydrogen. Formerly associated with the World Bank’s Climate Smart Mining Facility, he discusses the global race for mineral access through an Indian perspective.

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The climate of fear that gave way to unjustifiable environmental policies – by Conrad Black (Financial Post – May 8, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

Upon being re-elected prime minister in 2019, albeit with a minority of MPs and fewer votes than his chief opponent, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that it was time to tackle “our greatest problem: climate change.”

It is routinely and endlessly bandied about by most of our politicians and practically all of our media that climate change is, in the second-most tedious and toe-curling platitude in the current political lexicon (after “systemic racism”), “an existential threat” — i.e., our existence as human beings is threatened by climate change.

Yet there is a great deal of learned dissent from that conclusion, and even those reports most frequently cited as evidence that the end is nigh if we don’t pull up our socks and, in the case of Canada, shut down Alberta, if read carefully, do not justify the terrifying headlines that the media normally attaches to them.

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Biden’s conundrum: Expand EVs without harming the Earth – by Sara Schonhardt (E&E News – April 30, 2021)

https://www.eenews.net/

President Biden’s plan to rapidly shift to electric vehicles and renewable energy could find itself in conflict with another, less prominent commitment: improving the sustainability of the mineral and metals sector.

Much of that tension has to do with soaring demand worldwide for the rare earth elements used to make low-carbon goods, as well as the short amount of time the United States has set to reduce its carbon footprint.

“There’s an intrinsic conflict, yes,” said Kevin Book, who heads the research team at ClearView Energy Partners LLC. But “there’s got to be a first thing and a second thing, and right now it looks like climate is the first thing,” he said.

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Greenhouse gas emission targets boost enthusiasm for small modular nuclear reactors – by Dan Healing (CTV News Calgary/Canadian Press – April 25, 2021)

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/

CALGARY — The worldwide battle to control greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change is the best thing that’s happened for growth in the nuclear energy industry in decades, its proponents say.

They add that the development of smaller, scalable nuclear reactors to churn out reliable, emissions-free energy at a much lower than traditional cost makes nuclear an option that’s become impossible to ignore.

“Thirty years ago, the vision was that nuclear energy is going to be so cheap that we’ll be giving electricity away for free,” said Robby Sohi, president and CEO of Global First Power Ltd., a company trying to build Canada’s first small modular reactor or SMR.

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