Events

As President Biden prepares to address Cop27, it is already clear that “the world’s last chance to conquer climate change” will end in failure.Newsflash: 1.5 degrees is dead and buried.

None of the largest emitters are sticking to pledges made at earlier meetings. China, Russia and India have not even sent their leaders. No wonder campaigner Greta Thunberg is boycotting COP27 – dismissing it as “Greenwash.”

Among an increasing clamour for advanced western economies countries to pay “reparations,” some of the world’s worst carbon emitters (China, Brazil) are hiding behind a smokescreen of historical confusion. At least 20 per cent of historical carbon emissions took place before the industrialisation of the advanced economics since 1850. China has been burning coal for millenia. It had a booming iron and coal industry through the Tang and Song dynasties. In the 11th Century it was burning several hundred thousand tonnes of coal annually. And if you include deforestation as well as fossil fuel in the calculations, Malaysian and Argentina are as much to blame as UK – or China, which is currently the world’s largest emitter and set to increase.

Meanwhile the world’s energy companies are using Cop as a set of useful idiots to push through their plans to receive over $100 TRILLION for decarbonising the world’s energy grids – i.e. paying them to clean up the mess they created in the first place. It would be the most spectacular example of greenwashing in history.

But one little-noticed factor does justify the whole COP process and stop me at least from dismissing it as a complete waste of time. The giant global project to quantify our emissions is gathering pace.
The EU is finalising disclosure rules for 50,000 companies in the 27-country bloc to report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, as well as a company’s impact on the environment, known as double materiality. (https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/cop27-sustainable-standard-setters-close-regulatory-gap-2022-11-10/).

This initiative is a vital building block, and our last best chance to at least reduce the level of damage. Even though its too late to save 1.5, it is better than nothing.

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More than half of energy-rich state’s total power generation capacity remains offline

The electric grid, which is designed to enable energy trading rather than protecting domestic consumers, has collapsed in Texas due to extreme winter weather.  The same thing could easily happen elsewhere in America.

Houston’s mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter: “The city does not control the Texas power grid. We do not oversee Ercot which manages and serves as the traffic cop for the electric grid. That is the governor and the State of Texas.”

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been disrupted as energy prices spiked 100 times due to surging demand for heating in the extreme conditions. Many are reduced to melting snow to provide drinking water.

For residents of the Lone Star State, the problem stems from both a record spike in demand in a place that rarely gets this cold, as well as an unexpected drop in the supply of energy from natural gas, coal, wind, nuclear, and solar sources iced up by sleet and wind. This is coupled with the arcane power management setup in Texas – similar to other States.

Amid a backlash from angry Texans, Republican governor Greg Abbott called on the state’s legislature to investigate and reform Ercot. “The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours,” Abbott said. While the Texas power grid has proven largely capable of handling demand peaks during the state’s sweltering summers, the electricity supply system has been crippled by some of the coldest weather the state has experienced in decades. Wholesale electricity prices have hovered around Ercot’s price cap of $9,000 a megawatt-hour for days because of the supply shortages, far above typical prices of about $25/MWh. That has the potential to put immense strain on energy suppliers forced to buy at the astronomical prices.

US natural gas prices surged as much as 10 per cent on Tuesday to about $3.15 a million British thermal units, its highest level since October. Prices at one Oklahoma pricing hub, where supplies were extremely tight, soared from about $3 an MBtu to almost $1,000 an MBtu. The freezing temperatures and sustained power outages have also disrupted the state’s oil industry, the largest in the country. Producers in Texas’s Permian oilfield, one of the world’s most prolific, face days of disruptions as pipelines and other equipment freeze up and icy road conditions delay repairs.