Twitter

Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

OPINION: Tesla’s lavishly priced shares might soon lure it into the M&A game – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – December 10, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Tesla boss Elon Musk may be studying the blockbuster AOL-Time Warner merger of 20 years ago, the biggest, most sensational deal of the era. That’s because he may be considering a similar stunt himself – using Tesla Inc.’s crazily overvalued shares as a takeover currency.

But first, a reminder of those heady days, when the dot-com boom was still intact and America Online – better known as AOL, led by Steve Case – went shopping.

By then AOL was a tech juggernaut, a pioneer of e-mail, web portals, instant messaging and browsing. Mr. Case added CompuServe and Netscape to the mix, and investors fell in love with the whole techy mess.

Read more

Opinion: Canada’s climate-change child soldiers – by Andrew Roman (Financial Post – November 25, 2020)

https://financialpost.com/

“Canada produces just 1.6 per cent of global CO2 emissions, with
Ontario responsible for less than half of that. China, by contrast,
is at 30 per cent and rising.”

On Nov. 12 an Ontario judge refused to strike out a lawsuit by a group of two minor children and five youths alleging that the Ontario government’s 2018 reduction in its climate-change target by 15 per cent violates their constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of the person.

This judgment conflicts with a judgment of the Federal Court two weeks earlier, striking out an almost identical claim. The Ontario court should have followed the Federal Court precedent.

Most adults have an instinctive desire to protect innocent, vulnerable children. In the climate-change wars, however, we are seeing child litigants being used as climate-change soldiers in lawsuits brought by adult lawyers and their financial supporters.

Read more

OPINION: Forget electric vehicles. Post-pandemic cities don’t need them – they are still cars – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – November 21, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The Globe and Mail Future of Cities series showed how the pandemic might reshape Canada’s urban areas, probably for the better: fewer cars, more green space, a focus on community life, short travel times, the end with the obsession with single-family homes, among other goodies.

How does the electric vehicle (EV) fit into these scenarios? It shouldn’t, but it does.

The hype around EVs and their offspring, self-driving e-cars, is dazzling and relentless, and anyone who thinks they should not be part of the new urban mix is treated as a Luddite dotard with a romantic attachment to a convenient, but clapped-out and highly polluting, technology – the internal combustion engine.

Read more

End of the road? Quebec’s goal to ban gas-guzzling cars latest move to hasten oil’s decline – by Geoffrey Morgan (Financial Post – November 21, 2020)

https://financialpost.com/

Bob Larocque’s industry is planning for a future where the market for their main product, gasoline, begins to evaporate as national and sub-national governments phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles under increasingly ambitious timeframes.

“I need to understand how this will work,” said Larocque, president and CEO of the Ottawa-based Canadian Fuels Association, which represents Canadian oil refineries.

The global shift started with a planned ban on oil-powered vehicles in India in 2017, then Taiwan and Japan, with major economies in the European Union following suit.

Read more

Romania’s coal-black heartland embraces Europe’s Green New Deal – by Hans von der Brelie (Euro News – November 13, 2020)

https://www.euronews.com/

Our drone reveals an apocalyptic landscape of industrial decline: abandoned mine buildings as far as the eye can see.

This is Jiu Valley, in south-western Romania, a six-hour drive from the capital Bucharest: it’s Romania’s famous coal heartland.

But it now finds itself at a crossroads, as Europe’s coal regions transition away from this fossilised fuel to more environmentally-sustainable energy sourcess.

Read more

Any plan for Canada to reach its climate targets must include nuclear – by John Gorman (Financial Post – November 10, 2020)

https://financialpost.com/

CanadiansJohn Gorman is president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association.

If and their governments want a serious energy plan for Canada, one that doesn’t require sacrificing our economic interests for our social and physical well-being, or vice versa, they need to consider nuclear power.

Nuclear energy is clean, energy-dense carbon-free, and reliable, generating power around the clock, whatever the weather. No plan for Canada to reach its climate targets that doesn’t have nuclear in the mix is credible.

Nuclear power is one of the largest producers of clean electricity around the world and — though people forget this — it’s already one of the most important generators of electricity in Canada, accounting for 15 per cent of production.

Read more

Hundreds of coal mining jobs to end as power company switches to natural gas (Victoria Times Colonist – November 4, 2020)

https://www.timescolonist.com/

CANADIAN PRESS: CALGARY — Alberta power producer TransAlta Corp. says it will end operations at its Highvale thermal coal mine west of Edmonton by the end of 2021 as it switches to natural gas at all of its operated coal-fired plants in Canada four years earlier than previously planned.

The announcement will result in hundreds of mine job losses as employment drops to 40 to 50 people involved in reclamation work, expected to take about 20 years, from a peak workforce of around 1,500, said CEO Dawn Farrell on a conference call on Wednesday.

ransAlta confirmed last week it had closed a $400-million second tranche of a $750-million investment by an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management, with the proceeds to be used to advance its coal-to-gas conversion program and other corporate purposes.

Read more

Alaskan cobalt could supply EV demands – by Shane Lasley (North of 60 Mining News – October 29, 2020)

https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/

Whether it is the exponential growth in electric vehicles traveling global highways, the massive need for storing energy at solar and wind electrical generating facilities, or cutting the cords on our electronic devices, the world is becoming increasingly dependent on lithium-ion batteries.

And this is driving up the demand for cobalt, a critical safety ingredient in the cathodes of these energy storage cells.

“Globally, the leading use is in the manufacture of cathode materials for rechargeable batteries – primarily lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, and nickel-metal-hydride batteries – which are used in consumer electronics, electric and hybrid-electric vehicles, energy storage units, and power tools,” the United States Geological Survey wrote in the cobalt section of a 2018 report on critical minerals.

Read more

Liberals’ plan to replace fossil fuel with wind and solar is technically impossible and economically disastrous – by Gwyn Morgan (Financial Post – October 27, 2020)

https://financialpost.com/

Trying to solve any problem with a fix that defies the laws of physics is bound to fail

The combination of wildfires along the U.S. Pacific Coast, two simultaneous hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, melting glaciers and peat bog fires in Canada and an unusually hot summer in Europe has raised global warming fears to frenzied proportions.

Environmentalists are urging political leaders to legislate the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels. Curiously, the most extreme call for action came from the future King of England.

Prince Charles urged a “warlike footing” that would require the implementation of a centralized global authority to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. Just how such an unelected regime would exert power over the Earth’s 7.8 billion inhabitants wasn’t clear.

Read more

Clean energy, EVs and the two sides of the US election – by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud (Mining.com – October 25, 2020)

https://www.mining.com/

Market analyst Wood Mackenzie published a report laying the cards on the table as to what the future of clean energy and electric vehicles may look like following the November 3 election.

On one hand, President Donald Trump is promising to maintain the status quo somehow favouring oil, gas and coal and rejecting the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Contender Joe Biden, on the other hand, promises to launch a “clean energy revolution” whose goal is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Read more

We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal – by Emmet Penney and Adrian Calderon (The Bellows – September 25, 2020)

https://www.thebellows.org/

In July, presidential candidate Joe Biden released his climate and infrastructure plan, “The Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future.”

From the automotive industry, to infrastructure, to addressing racial inequality, to labor protections, to a massive renewable energy build out, Biden aims to remake the American industrial base, right past wrongs, and generate a gobsmacking 10 million “good union jobs” in the process.

For comparison, the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal created 8.5 million jobs. Biden’s capacious plan has raised eyebrows. Some believe it speaks to his “deceptive radicalism;” others rightly point out that he’s “endorsed the Green New Deal in all but name.”

Read more

Ottawa’s climate-change policies fail to protect First Nations against food scarcity: study – by Kathryn Blaze Baum (Globe and Mail – October 21, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Federal climate-change policies have largely ignored the effects of global warming on First Nations’ access to traditional food, leaving Indigenous people increasingly vulnerable to food shortages and related health problems, according to an 18-month study by an international human rights agency.

The Human Rights Watch report details the myriad challenges First Nations people are confronting with greater frequency when trying to acquire healthy food – from thin ice cover on traditional hunting routes to biodiversity loss, unpredictable winter roads, shorter hunting seasons and lower yields of fish in waters that not long ago boasted bountiful stocks.

First Nations people who live off the land are bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change on food security, the report says.

Read more

B.C.’s 14 operating mines could shrink to just five in 20 years, report warns – by Nelson Bennett (BIV/Alaska Highway News – October 17, 2020)

https://www.alaskahighwaynews.ca/

B.C. has a serious carbon leakage problem that could see the mining industry here shrink over the next 20 years, and emissions from mining rise in other countries, a new report by the Mining Association of (MABC) warns.

It warns that B.C.’s 14 operating mines could shrink to just five by 2040. When carbon taxes were first introduced in B.C. by the Liberal government, they were generally supported by B.C.’s mining industry.

But the industry expected other competing jurisdictions would likewise implement carbon pricing. Most didn’t. Moreover, the NDP ended carbon tax neutrality, in which increases in carbon taxes are offset with decreases in other taxes.

Read more

Clean Energy Can’t Have Dirty Roots – by Ketan Joshi and Antony Loewenstein (Foriegn Policy – October 15, 2020)

https://foreignpolicy.com/

Securing human rights in the supply chain of critical minerals is vital for a green future.

On the face of it, the recent news that California will ban the sale of petrol cars in 2035 and favor electric vehicles is a positive development toward a greener, safer, and more sustainable world. And yet this announcement brings as many questions as answers, not least whether electric vehicles really are the best and easiest solution to the climate crisis.

The reality is far more complicated. The electrification of transport and the construction of new clean energy like solar are vital components of curing the carbon problem. But they come with their own novel and potentially show-stopping environmental and ethical costs, and these must urgently be grappled with by those of us who call for climate action at a rapid rate.

Everyone who expected climate policy to cool in the year of COVID-19 has been sorely disappointed. A flurry of announcements is increasing as the end of the year approaches, mostly relating to either general climate ambition, the accelerated deployment of mature technologies, or innovation to create new ones.

Read more

Solar ‘new king’ of electricity, but shift to net zero will require ‘unwavering efforts from all’ – by Terence Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – October 13, 2020)

https://www.miningweekly.com/

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has declared solar the “new king” of electricity, arguing that, while renewables technologies as a whole are poised for rapid growth over the coming several decades, solar will be “at the centre of this new constellation of electricity generation technologies”.

The agency’s ‘World Energy Outlook 2020’ notes that, with sharp cost reductions over the past decade, solar photovoltaic (PV) is now consistently cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, while solar PV projects now offer some of the lowest cost electricity ever seen.

The report notes that the lowest price announced for solar PV in a competitive auction so far is $13/MWh, achieved in Portugal in August 2020.

Read more