Ban-Ki Moon's Climate Summit Dead In The Water

By: Andrew_McKillop

World Leader's Declare Lack of Interest
The heavily touted UN “summit” on climate change, later this month in New York was supposed to set the scene for next year's UN follow-up Paris conference and lead to “binding international resolutions” to cut CO2 emissions and defeat the menace of Global Warming.

What menace of Global Warming? Why are world leaders falling over themselves to back out now, and certainly not follow-on next year at a Paris summit? The UN-issued propaganda now has a sad and forlorn look about it!

Not Going to be There
Indian media has for weeks published that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the world's third-largest greenhouse gas-emitting nation, will not join his U.S. counterparts at the United Nations climate summit this month in New York. Chinese president Xi Jinping has now officially decided to skip this meeting of leaders to discuss climate change in New York. Possibly the supreme insult for Barack Obama and his all-new, all-fervent ally on defeating the menace of Global Warming, France's Francois Hollande who will host the downsized 2015 summit, the German daily TAZ reports that Chancellor Angela Merkel is not going to bother to attend the Ban Ki-Moon conference in New York. TAZ adds that Merkel’s decision to snub the event is probably a clear sign that efforts to forge a global and binding climate agreement are already dead in water.

Other national leaders who will certainly not be there include the prime ministers of Japan, Canada and Australia who have already formally abandoned any idea of Kyoto Treaty carbon taxes and obligatory emissions trading in their own countries.

Inside Europe, the world's “last bastion” of self-righteous Carbon Correct, Donald Tusk’s nomination as the next President of the European Council to replace Herman van Rompuy is a major game changer for the dwindling band of the Climate Correct. Poland obtains over 80% of its electricity from coal-burning and has no intention of giving that up.

Poland has already and consistently acted to block the extremes of “climate self-righteousness” and the  pomposity which comes with it in Europe, and Tusk heavily favors the reduction of European subsidies to uneconomic projects, notably in the energy sector. He is also opposed to Europe's ETS emissions trading scheme – a cesspit of crony traders and banksters which has made a laughing stock of EU emissions credits and certificates.

The Whine of the Losers
Writing for EurActiv, 2 September, fellow Pole Andrzej Ancygier criticized Donald Tusk's election as the new Mr Europe saying that whereas in Poland, Tusk could take advantage of his prerogatives as the Prime Minister, “in Brussels he will have to deal with much stronger personalities with more rational arguments”. For Ancygier these “rational arguments” are those of the December 2008 climate-energy package voted by the European Parliament, probably the most-extreme-ever Climate Correct that is possible this side of the Moon.

For climate correct Europeans – who are now totally abandoned by China, India, Japan, Canada and Australia – and even Angela Merkel is “cultivating her ambiguity” on the subject -  Tusk as PM in Poland pursued a “disastrous energy and climate policy”. In other words he was not interested in the prayer wheel of climate correct, and his science advisors did not believe in global warming.

In so many different EU energy forums, some of which I reported as energy correspondent for “Europolitics” of Brussels, Poland's rational energy strategy alternative were steadfastly advanced and were hard to deny. Tusk's government mapped out a solution to the Carbon Correct endgame that Europe has sunk itself into. As we can expect from the lazy-minded and self-satisfied but dwindling band of Global Warming profiteers and hysterics, they immediately responded to Tusk with innuendo and insults. They also “bent the data” whenever it suited them, which is often.

 The complete halt to Global Warming for at least 13 years, for example, is “a statistical blip”. You have to come back in 25 or 35 years time. Between times, you must support or tolerate all excesses of the crony finance “community” as it creates value out of tradable “climate paper”. A tiny fraction of this will trickle down as windfarms or bolt-on solar collectors on housing and offices, here and there. Believe us. The planet is menaced.

In fact Donald Tusk's hard line on climate extremism will serve him as Council president – not only will he be at ease with Chinese, Indian, Russian, Japanese, Canadian, Australian and other leaders who totally reject Europe's climate fantasy-fear, but he will be able to compromise, climb down and set the agenda for rational strategies. Put another way, the remaining EU28 hard-line climate purists, which certainly includes France and may include the UK, will have to take a much more active role and will have to reveal themselves. They will have to become even more aggressive than previous. So doing, they will quickly talk their way into the void.  

In any case, in the French and British cases, their leadership stance of “climate purity” is only a thinly veiled nuclear power plant building strategy, forcing them to rack up electricity prices for all powere users at several times the CPI on a long-term and sustained basis. In the French case this is 7 times the CPI of around 1.5% per year, at least until 2017, by executive order of Mr Hollande in 2013. Nuclear power is expensive.

Destroying the Power Companies
Tusk also earned himself bad marks among Euro-liberals who are statist and in no way interested in free markets when it concerns “the struggle against global warming”, by acting to save Poland's power companies.  His willingness to save Polish state-owned energy companies from the fate of their German counterparts who have suffered a melt-down in investor confidence and share value, due to the Energiewende transition program, is brushed aside and sidelined by the climate purists as only because of his “personal convictions”. He could (or even should) have let them collapse!

Plenty of arguments can be made that Germany;s Big 4 utility companies had it coming to them. They refused to innovate, weren't interested in “saving the climate” or in renewable energy, and so on. The problem is the “legacy power producers” exist and without them Germany is out of electricity.

At a smaller scale and an accelerated basis, Poland faced exactly the same endgame due to European climate correct. It included simply fantastic new investment needs for power companies – and declining revenues in a thick forest of new regulations. What could be more business friendly?

Without much surprise, Germany's No 2 power producer, RWE, has said on several recent occasions that it could or might entirely abandon the electricity business, at least in Germany. Among the supposed obligations hanging over the power companies, in several countries including Germany, is that they must not only buy self-generated renewable power from their customer-producers, but also finance these customers to produce it, of course at sub-market rates of interest (which goes without saying). The free market!

European Energy Anarchy
Donald Tusk could or might be hard-line conservative, but he has reacted. The leaderships of China, India, Russia, Japan, Canada and Australia have also reacted. Inside Europe as well as outside it, now, climate correct and low carbon – with somebody else footing the bill – no longer passes Bank and gets the gaming chips to double the bet. The game was fun for some while it lasted, but it lasted too long.

For the climate correct policy making elite in their corridors of power, and a few downstream profiteers like the Low Carbon urban design fraternity and their transport sector brethren, not forgetting the Green Business gurus, the game had to keep going. Whether it tore down the European power sector and left it in shambles was of no interest at all to them. President Obama's pathetic and very unsuccessful attempts to force – rather than persuade – low income countries to “invest in carbon capture and sequestration” are another sign that time is up for this game.

We can be certain that the learn nothing-forget nothing elite herd self defence principle will be operating, as world tolerance and patience with Europe's “shining example for the world” disappears from view and leaves ordinary electricity users in Germany, for example, paying around 25 euro cents a kiloWatthour – in oil terms the equivalent of about $540 a barrel. All of Germany's major industrial firms, including all its world-class carmakers have advanced plans and projects to become totally autonomous for electricity by as early as 2025. Their “vote of no confidence” in Energiwende and self-satisfied Climate Correct is explained in a couple of lines!

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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