European View of Trump’s Climate Threat
February 25, 2017
We are pushing Europe toward China.
Money quote here – “The only thing that this administration will respond to is pressure…words will not suffice, EU has to work together with China to exert maximum pressure.”
Faced with a U.S. retreat from international efforts to tackle climate change, European Union officials are looking to China, fearing a leadership vacuum will embolden those within the bloc seeking to slow the fight against global warming.
While U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to act on campaign pledges to pull out of the 2015 Paris accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions, his swift action in other areas has sparked sharp words from usually measured EU bureaucrats.
When Trump’s former environment adviser, until the president’s inauguration this month, took to a stage in Brussels on Wednesday and called climate experts “urban imperialists”, a rebuke from Britain’s former energy minister drew applause from the crowd packed with EU officials.
But with fault lines over Brexit, dependence on Russian energy and protecting industry threatening the bloc’s own common policy, some EU diplomats worry Europe is too weak to lead on its own in tackling climate change.
Instead, they are pinning their hopes on China, concerned that without the backing of the world’s second-biggest economy support for the global pact to avert droughts, rising seas and other affects of climate change will flounder.
“Can we just fill the gap? No because we will be too fragmented and too inward looking,” one EU official, involved in climate talks, told Reuters. “Europe will now be looking to China to make sure that it is not alone.”
Meanwhile, disruptive change continues as Germany, Europe’s largest economy, charges ahead to a renewable future.
Last year at this time, RWE, one of Germany’s largest power producers, announced a surprise annual loss for 2015 and scrapped its dividend for the first time in decades.
That was nothing.
Today, the company warned of an even bigger loss in 2016—a whopping €5.7 billion ($6 billion)—and, again, decided to forgo a dividend payment for most shareholders.
The main culprit is a €3.7 billion writedown in the value of RWE’s German power-plant portfolio. Wholesale power prices have plunged in Germany in recent years, as the country ramps up renewable production. Around 30% of the country’s power is now generated by renewable sources, with a long-term target of 80% by 2050.
“The large writedown is unhelpful, but this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise in the context of wholesale power prices that are still historically low,” noted analysts at Jefferies after RWE’s announcement.
As more wind and solar capacity comes online, the value of fossil fuel-burning plants has plummeted. Both RWE and EON, its main German competitor, have written down the value of their power plants by some €30 billion in recent years, according to Bloomberg, especially since German policymakers announced an aggressive “Energy Transition” (Energiewende) in 2010.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
February 25, 2017 at 10:29 am
[…] via European View of Trump’s Climate Threat | Climate Denial Crock of the Week […]
February 25, 2017 at 10:51 am
Those who don’t like accepting that climate change is happening should go to c 7:26 in the video where the Arctic temperature changes and their effects on people and wildlife are presented.
The Brexit brouhaha was ramped up by the very same organs that recently gave David Rose space to lie to the readership again with the aid of Judith Curry and a fellow called Bates. We already know that some of those pushing for Brexit were allied to the GWPF and they have clear motives for attempting to water down or do away with environmental legislation that could affect their revenue streams. Isn’t that right Mr Matt Ridley.
It is little surprise that Judith Curry has now written a ‘report’ for the GWPF where she confuses laypeople about climate models. Her standing as a scientists has taken such a tail spin that she now has to resort to such tactics whilst accusing other scientists of ostracising her. Just when you think she cannot get any lower she proves you wrong again.
The John Bates and Curry (abetted by David Rose) has become the starter for a fresh round of defamatory attacks on scientists by Tim Ball under the cover of WUWT. Sou at HotWhopper takes this apart: Anthony Watts publishes another recklessly defamatory article about NOAA scientists, by Tim Ball.
Voisin and our pet Bates should take particular note of the post by Bernard J. dated and timed: February 21, 2017 at 11:40 PM.
The urgency of the situation is obvious to all thinking people. Our society is built as a house of cards with many of the cards buckling and vanishing including vital ones, many not even classified by science, that are essential to the well being of the whole.
Flippant ignorance costs lives.
February 25, 2017 at 1:19 pm
It is obvious you have no interest in the data or truth as you live in a bizarro world of distorted facts presented to you by those who want power and your money.
Here are the actual prices of electricity in europe
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
Watts has simply pointed out the NOAA folks are simply doing poor science and or are lying. When STAR data shows a cooling, UAH and RSS show no warming for a long time, and Giss is 66 percent fake temperatures there is a problem and it is not Watts.
Take temperatures, droughts they vary a lot
Greenland
Click to access Kobashi_2011_GRL.pdf
Alaska
http://www.livescience.com/39819-ancient-forest-thaws.html
Droughts
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151106144515.htm
The planet is not the cookie cutter thing the AGW folks pretend it is to get power and money.
February 25, 2017 at 11:40 am
The rest of the world should consider slapping carbon tariffs on all US exports.
February 25, 2017 at 1:08 pm
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
Why not look at actual prices in europe.
February 25, 2017 at 6:23 pm
Dick-in-hand Tom ignores differing situations such as the sources of the electricity and the clean-up taxation applied to those prices.
The USA generally does not take such clean-up into account so future generations will have to pay for the pollution caused by fracking, coal mining, coal burning and nuclear clean up
February 26, 2017 at 11:48 am
So your solution to anybody who ;point out you are a liar is to call them names. That simply makes you look even more stupid than you appear to be. None of those prices contain any of the charges you claim.
March 3, 2017 at 4:37 am
My solution to the particular problem of a lying fool is to observe that he(?) is conducting intellectual masturbation. You have had your utter ignorance and inability to earn pointed out to you numerous times but you continue to troll.
Grow up and start thinking
February 25, 2017 at 11:40 pm
Tommy Poo,
Two questions:
1) When are you going to retract your lies about the NASA/GISS global temperature results, lies that I pointed out to you many times here over the past few months? You know, the lies that I was able to disprove with the application of high-school math & college-undergraduate programming skills?
2) When are you going to demonstrate to us that you have figured out the difference between the stratosphere and the troposphere? You know, the kind of science stuff that I learned in junior high many decades ago?
February 26, 2017 at 4:21 am
While he is at it poor old Utzi the iceman is still waiting for Master Bates to explain his circumstances
February 26, 2017 at 12:04 pm
STAR data shows a cooling. Giss is homogenized and during that process a whole lot of data holes are filled with made up data. A whole lot of actual data is thrown out and made up data put in. NOAA excuse is to have an example of two stations at different altitudes. They never mention why a station like Barrow Alaska at sea level is changed which is now called Utqiagvik which I am not even trying to pronounce.
Hansen invented Giss with the help of others and he said data prior to 1950 was unreliable yet suddenly a few years later we go back to 1880 and NOAA is busy plugging in changes in that data while pretending it is suddenly more reliable.
I will concede the world is warmer than in the depths of the little ice age and that is a good thing. Plenty of people would not be alive if we had the CO2 concentrations back than and the temperatures back than today.
February 26, 2017 at 8:37 pm
Tommy Poo,
In addition to being a dumpf&*!, you are a complete lying sack of s&@!
Months ago, I pointed you to a post that I wrote that described — in excruciating detail — how the NASA global land temperature results can be replicated very closely with completely *unadjusted* data. That’s right — no adjustments, no “made up” data: just straight temperature data supplied by the met offices of nations around the world, completely untouched by the NASA/NOAA homogenization/adjustment processes.
I described exactly how to process that unadjusted data to reproduce the NASA warming trend, using nothing more than high-school math and college-undergraduate computer-programming techniques. I showed you that the most important reason for the adjustments was to correct for the movement of urban temperatures to outlying (and cooler) airport locations — I demonstrated that with results that I computed myself from the unadjusted temperature data.
Yet you still persist on posting bald-faced lies about the NOAA and NASA/GISS global temperature results.
You are totally incompetent and do not possess a shred of integrity or decency.
February 25, 2017 at 9:23 pm
Only if they have their own carbon tax.
February 25, 2017 at 1:06 pm
Germany has the second highest electricity prices in europe.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
Merkel has been phasing out fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants buying energy, a lot of it from French nuclear plants as does Britain.
This story is a series of lies and distortions which is typical of this blog of late. that is to bad because renewables are one source of energy which could be important in parts of the world with no other sources of energy and if the prices drop enough and the storage problem is solved for others as well.
Why blog with lies and distortions? You do not need to do that unless your income depends on clicks which do not occur if you are presenting resonable points of view.
February 25, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Still the Germans are paying less for their electricity because they don’t use even half he amount than a US citizen. Energy is vastly more subsidised in the US than in the EU. That’s the direction countries should go.
February 25, 2017 at 2:53 pm
And of course your claim that Germany would be importing more electicity from France is not true. Germany is exporting more electricity than it is importing.
=> The myth of the dark side of the Energiewende
The “lies and distortions” are coming from you, Tom. That’s how we know you.
February 26, 2017 at 4:14 am
Of course your claim that Germany would be importing more electicity from France is not true. Germany is exporting more electricity than it is importing.
=> The myth of the dark side of the Energiewende
The “lies and distortions” are coming from you, Tom. And that’s how we know you.
February 26, 2017 at 12:16 pm
“Germany has the second highest electricity prices in europe” Germans are generating quite a bit of their own power these days (windmills, solar panels) so high prices probably doesn’t mean to them the level of catastrophe it means to you.
February 26, 2017 at 4:15 am
Of course your claim that Germany would be importing more electicity from France is not true. Germany is exporting more electricity than it is importing.
=> The myth of the dark side of the Energiewende
The “lies and distortions” are coming from you, Tom. And that’s how we know you.
February 26, 2017 at 12:21 pm
There’s a 50% chance in the next decade of the Gulf Stream slowing and Europe beginning the process of becoming 5 C (9 F) cooler. That process could finish by end of century. This was thought earlier impossible to happen for hundreds of years, but the most recent results indicate a significant chance of it happening in the next few decades, not centuries. http://climatenewsnetwork.net/stark-warning-atlantic-ocean-cooling/
March 2, 2017 at 8:06 pm
[…] came across this comment the other day from some climate denier, the figure he was referring to being given below. The […]