Thursday, June 1, 2017

Climate policy isn't about climate, UN IPCC official says. It's about 'distributing world wealth.' Climate conventions are actually economic conventions-Nov. 2010 interview, NZZam Sontag

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UN IPCC climate official, 2008-2015, Ottmar Edenhofer states the "climate" issue isn't about climate, "We are de facto distributing world wealth through climate policy."  2010 interview:  

11/14/2010, "Climate policy redistributes world wealth," NZZamSontag, interview with Ottmar Edenhofer by Bernhard Potter

Edenhofer
"It is a great mistake to discuss climate politics separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancún at the end of the month (Nov. 2010) is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conventions since the Second World War....

One has to say clearly: We are de facto distributing world wealth through climate policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy, with problems like forest extinction or ozone hole....

Then we have to see that successful climate policy needs a different global trade and financial policy."...above image of Edenhofer from his website

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From 2008 to 2015 Ottmar Edenhofer was UN IPCC Co-Chair of Working Group III. Among other duties, he'll lay groundwork for worldwide emissions trading: 

"Ottmar Edenhofer takes on chairmanship within IPCC," Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (undated) 

"Ottmar Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and Youba Sokona from Mali. In the next seven years the co-chairs will map out strategies for solutions in climate and energy issues and lay out the groundwork for worldwide emissions trading." 

From Edenhofer's website: "Ottmar Edenhofer’s research influences political decision making. He is advising ministers such as former German Foreign Minister and now President-elect Frank-Walther Steinmeier and advises the World Bank on questions of green growth. Furthermore, he is a member of the “High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices” chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Lord Nicholas Stern at the invitation of Ségolène Royal and Feike Sijbesma, Co-Chairs of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) High Level Assembly. The commission is preparing a scientific assessment for the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in 2017. In connection with the German G20 presidency this year, Edenhofer heads the T20 Task Force “Climate Policy and Finance” preparing scientific policy advice for the G20 and is a member of the OECD Advisory Council “Growth, Investment and the Low-Carbon Transition”."...
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Added: US CO2 has been plunging. Why isn't anyone talking about it (in 2012)? Answer: Because the news is awkward for Obama:
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7/17/2012, "U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions — so why aren’t we talking about it?" Grist, David Roberts

"Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. is making progress on climate change.

We have cut our carbon emissions more than any other country in the world in recent years — 7.7 percent since 2006. U.S. emissions fell 1.9 percent last year and are projected to fall 1.9 percent again this year...

Why isn’t this extraordinary story a bigger deal in U.S. politics? You’d think Obama would be boasting about it! Turns out, though, it’s a little awkward for him, since several of the drivers responsible are things for which

he can’t (or might not want to) take credit....

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Awkward: that whole recession thing

First off there’s the Great Recession, which flattened electricity demand in 2008. It has never recovered — in fact, in part due to 2011′s mild winter, it has even declined slightly....

For obvious reasons, boasting about the environmental benefits of the recession is not something Obama’s eager to do.

Awkward: frack-o-mania

The second big driver is the glut of cheap natural gas, which is currently trading at the 10-year low of about $3 per million British thermal units. This is absolutely crushing coal, the biggest source of CO2 in the electric sector....

A less significant driver of the switch from coal to natural gas is the EPA’s long overdue rollout of new or tightened clean-air rules on mercury, SO2 and NOx, and CO2. Those rules may do more work later on down the line when/if natural gas prices rise again, but for now the best analysis [PDF] shows that natural gas is doing most of the work killing coal....

Thus: silence in the political world."...
 
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US CO2 emissions are expected to decline even further: "
U.S. emissions started going down in 2005 and are expected to decline further over the next decade."

 4/21/2012, "Why [CO2] Emissions Are Declining in the U.S. But Not in Europe," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, newgeography.com

"As we note
below in a new article for Yale360, a funny thing happened:


U.S. emissions started going down in 2005 and are expected to decline further over the next decade."  


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