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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

Coal mining near Sparwood, B.C., faces uncertain future – by Alex Tardieu (CBC News Calgary – December 13, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/

Mining vital to Sparwood economy, but pressure mounting to get off the coal train

Members of Troy Cook’s family have been miners for four generations. His great-grandfather dug through underground rock in Czechoslovakia. The 52-year-old has worked for the Elkview Mine near Sparwood, B.C., for 34 years. Coal is in his DNA.

“I’m super proud to be a coal miner,” he says. “It’s been a great life. A lot of great people at the mine.” After all those years of extracting metallurgical coal — used to make steel — Cook suffers from back pain and hearing problems.

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Geothermal brines in California’s Salton Sea could be future source of lithium in the US – by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud (Mining.com – December 12, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

A literature review prepared by Berkeley Lab scientists found that geothermal brines in the Salton Sea region of California are expected to be a major source of domestic lithium for the United States in the future but that significant technical challenges have to be overcome.

One of the main obstacles is that brine is extremely hot when it comes out of the subsurface, and it contains a rich stew of many dissolved minerals in addition to lithium.

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Mandatory EV sales quotas needed by end of next year: Guilbeault – by Mia Rabson (Canadian Press/Toronto Sun – December 10, 2021)

https://torontosun.com/

OTTAWA — Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says he wants a national mandate that would force auto dealers to sell a certain number of electric vehicles to be in place by the end of next year.

Road transportation accounts for one-fifth of Canada’s total greenhouse-gas emissions. As Canada charts a path to net zero by 2050, eliminating carbon dioxide from passenger cars is a big part of the process.

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Opinion: Half a century of climate panic hasn’t worked. Let’s get smarter – by Bjorn Lomborg (Financial Post – December 7, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

The recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was predictably branded as our “ last chance ” to tackle the “ climate catastrophe ” and “ save humanity .” Like many others, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry warned us that we have only nine years left to avert most of “catastrophic” global warming.

Almost every climate summit has been branded as the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. For the past half-century we have continually been told that time has just about run out. This message is spectacularly wrong and leads to panic and poor policies.

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Wall Street Holds Fast to Fossil Fuels as Climate Pressure Grows – by Nicholas Comfort and Steven Arons (Bloomberg News – December 6, 2021)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

With the ink hardly dry on a landmark pledge by the finance industry to fight climate change, the world’s biggest banks are making clear they plan to stand by their fossil-fuel clients.

Take JPMorgan Chase & Co., the leading arranger of bonds for oil, gas and coal companies. In the weeks since the bank in October joined Mark Carney’s global alliance to achieve net-zero emissions from finance, it has underwritten some $2.5 billion in bond deals for companies like Gazprom PJSC and Continental Resources Inc., equivalent to the same period in previous years.

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OPINION: Coal went from investor pariah to luvvie in one year. How did that happen as the planet warms up? – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – December 3, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A year ago, the world’s biggest resources companies were apparent slaves to the ESG movement. Many of them were open to ejecting their dirtiest fossil fuels from their portfolios to attract the cherished “green” premium offered by investors who wanted to own more climate-friendly companies.

Today, these very same companies are resisting the pressure to ditch their fossil fuels in the name of making their environmental, social and governance credentials more attractive – and they are getting away it.

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Canada is being short-changed by climate bookkeepers – by Diane Francis (Financial Post – December 2, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

The whole country is a gigantic carbon sink with an abundance of natural features that decarbonize the world

Canada’s new minister of the environment, Steven Guilbeault, has an opportunity to do something meaningful about climate, but he must scrap the irrational and inaccurate assumptions swallowed whole by his predecessor.

The first major reform needed is to toss out the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, introduced in Parliament on Nov. 19, 2020, which formalizes Canada’s commitment to the UN to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050.

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OPINION: If we’re serious about reducing emissions, it’s time for a new look at nuclear energy – by Marcus Gee (Globe and Mail – November 27, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Canada’s biggest city is fortunate to have two founts of clean, green, plentiful energy just down the road. One, of course, is Niagara Falls. Water diverted from the towering cataract to hydroelectric turbines has been keeping lights lit in Toronto for more than a century.

The other, less-heralded source is the two massive nuclear power plants that stand just east of the city at Pickering and Darlington. Though much of the city’s juice comes from there, most people barely give them a thought.

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Coal’s last boom? World’s dirtiest fuel isn’t being put out of business anytime soon – by Bianca Bharti (Financial Post – November 30, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

At the end of the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Alok Sharma, president of the United Nations’ 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), fought tears as he announced that 197 countries had only been able to agree to “phasing down” the use of coal, rather than “phasing out” one of the main sources of global warming.

“May I say to all delegates I apologize for the way this process has unfolded and I am deeply sorry,” Sharma, a minister in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet, said at the culmination of the two-week summit on Nov. 13.

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Why raw materials could impact speed of energy transition – by Sergio Matalucci (DW.com – November 29, 2021)

https://www.dw.com/en/

Decarbonization is a complicated process as it implies a rethinking of how our economies can function smoothly. Currently, climate-neutral energy systems require significant amounts of critical raw materials for renewable energy installations and storage solutions.

As climate goals get more ambitious, prices of raw materials are going up, making renewable investments marginally more expensive and more exposed to geopolitical tensions.

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Coal phase-out may take longer than countries are willing to admit – report – by Staff (Mining.com – November 23, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

A new report by Wood Mackenzie states that despite countries agreeing to phase down coal at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, thermal coal demand is expected to rise until the mid-2020s.

“Under our base case Energy Transition Outlook (ETO), which is aligned to a 2.7°C warming TO scenario, demand for thermal coal will peak in 2025 at just over 7 billion tonnes, falling by just 5% to 6.7 billion tonnes in 2030,” Julian Kettle, who is senior vice president and vice-chair of metals and mining at WoodMac, wrote in the report.

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The ghastly charade in Glasgow and the West’s self-flagellation over the climate – by Conrad Black (National Post – November 21, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

Last week in this space, as the Glasgow climate change conference (COP26) was wrapping up, I pointed out once again what a colossal scam most of the climate fear campaign is. A 1 C increase in very approximately estimated world temperature in 120 years does not remotely justify the widespread hysteria on this subject in Western Europe and North America.

Countless predictions of imminent climate disaster over the last 50 years have proved to be utter piffle. Yet the frenzy does not abate. Organized groups of schoolchildren march about accusing the world’s adults of inflicting ecological strangulation upon them. (We should bring back corporal punishment before we shut down the oil industry.)

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David Suzuki says pipelines will be ‘blown up’ if leaders don’t act on climate change (CHEK News – November 21, 2021)

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A renowned environmental activist has a stern warning for politicians and global leaders if they fail to act on climate change.n“There are going to be pipelines blowing up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on,” David Suzuki told CHEK News on Saturday without elaborating further.

The prominent environmentalist made the comments during an Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island protest — called a Funeral for the Future — in downtown Victoria on Saturday afternoon. Suzuki was also at the group’s first event in the United Kingdom in 2018.

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Biden’s bad green policy supply chain – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – November 20, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

With all the policy angst about global supply chain crises that threaten various physical aspects of the international economy, from the movement of goods through vital ports to rising inflation to production bottlenecks, there’s another kind of supply chain crisis in the works.

That’s the supply of bad ideas that are streaming like flood waters into economic policy from the climate policy ocean. A prime demonstration of the ideological pileup is the chain-link of ideas driving U.S. President Joe Biden’s plans for the U.S. auto industry.

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Clean energy faces its own supply chain crisis – by Justine Calma (The Verge – November 17, 2021)

https://www.theverge.com/

The future of energy in America will depend on whether the US can break free from its dependence on other countries that dominate clean energy supply chains. To reach the Biden administration’s energy and environmental goals, the US will have to dramatically scale up its mining and manufacturing, lawmakers argued today during a joint hearing of the House Energy Subcommittee and the Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee. They also raised serious concerns about the US’s ability to do so.

“The sustainable economy of the future will definitely need to be built and manufactured. The question that remains to be seen is whether it will be manufactured by Americans,” said Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY) in his opening statement.

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