Kill Kyoto Liabilities

by Viv Forbes

  

cartoonist Gary Varel

The Kyoto Protocol was dreamed up by the Climate Jet-set in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.

One of the first decisions of born-again-green PM, Kevin Rudd, was to commit Australia to Kyoto Phase 1 in 2007.  This treaty required signatories to reduce production of carbon dioxide to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.

As a late joiner, Australia got a lower target, involving no actual cuts.  And they achieved that easy target by robbing Australian landowners - they stole carbon credits from landowners by imposing tree clearing bans. That larcenous trick can’t be pulled twice.

Ironically, the death notice for the Kyoto misadventure was posted by Japan, the birthplace of Kyoto, when they announced at Cancun in 2010 that Japan would not agree to any further targets. Japan was shocked at the billions in liabilities they had accumulated by not meeting Kyoto 1 target cuts.

Undeterred by this warning, another ALP/Green government agreed to Kyoto 2 in 2012 – 5% below 2000 levels by 2020.

This target, agreed to without due diligence, is dreamland stuff for Australia. Once the growing population is taken into account, this target would require Australians in 2020 to maintain industries and create new jobs using 30% less hydro-carbon energy per capita than was used in 2000.

Mining and mineral processing, agriculture, manufacturing, transport, tourism, electricity generation, cement, forestry and fishing are the backbone industries of Australia. Not one of these industries could maintain production while also significantly reducing their production of carbon dioxide, unless Australia embarks on a crash program of building new hydro and/or nuclear power stations. The chance that green regulators or politicians will allow either of these options any time soon is zero.

The use of carbon fuels, more than any other indicator, measures the growth and health of modern economies. The only way to kill carbon is to kill the economy – close industries or send them overseas. The Global Financial Crisis probably did more to reduce the use of hydro-carbon fuels than Kyoto will ever do.

Japan’s exit from Kyoto obligations was soon followed by Canada and Russia. USA never signed, nor did China, India, South Africa or Brazil.

Thus the four biggest economies in our region (USA, China, Japan and India) are not burdened by Kyoto. Nor are our big competitors - Brazil (iron and beef), Indonesia (coal), Chile (copper) and Canada (wheat). We only have the Kiwis and the faraway Europeans sharing the sinking Kyoto ship.

The Kyoto Agreement is a failure. Australia repealed the costly carbon dioxide tax. Next we should get rid of Kyoto liabilities.

sourced from WUWT

Engineering the Emissions Target Depression.

By Viv Forbes



The Climate Change Authority wants Australians to cut their production of carbon dioxide to 19% below 2000 levels by the year 2020.

The climate boffins should employ a demographer before they set such unrealistic goals.

The population of Australia in 2000 was about 19 million and it is now 23 million. By 2020 it will probably be over 25 million.

If Australia’s production of carbon dioxide was merely frozen at the 2000 level, that would require a 24% reduction per head of population by 2020.

If we add to that a real reduction in total emissions of 19% by 2020, emissions per capita would need to fall by 39% in just 6 years.



Cartoonist Steve Hunter

Even more unbelievable, China (supported by the UN/IPCC) thinks that developed countries “need to cut emissions by 40% from their 1990 levels by 2020”. This would require Australia’s per capita emissions to fall by 60% to just 40% of their 1990 levels. All achieved within the next six years.

Nothing real gets produced or done without generating carbon dioxide. Every working car, truck, tractor, dozer, quad bike, boat, helicopter, bulk carrier and aeroplane generates carbon dioxide. None of these will be powered by wind-mills, sunbeams or nuclear power in the next six years. How will they force us to use 39% less of them – carbon ration cards?

Making steel, bricks, cement, bitumen, minerals, metals, food, fertilisers and roads produces carbon dioxide - shall we each use just 61% of what we did in 2000?

Humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, barbeques, champagne and beer also emit carbon dioxide – shall we ration these too?

And Australian trains, lifts, supermarkets, operating theatres, refineries and power stations will not keep working 24/7 without base-load electricity from coal and gas, both generating carbon dioxide. Who is volunteering for living with brown-outs, blackouts or irregular “Earth Hours” for about four months of the year?

There is one way to achieve these goals – “The Tasmanian Solution”. Send 40% of our remaining industry to Asia, and convert Australia into a quiet green utopia of genteel poverty. This should create sufficient unemployment and reduced consumption to achieve the required emissions austerity.

Is the Climate Change Authority engineering an emissions target depression to achieve its savage cuts, or is this just another mindless model-driven target? We should demand to see their detailed plans for achieving these targets.

Carbon dioxide is hugely beneficial for all plant life, and its effect on global temperature is tiny and probably beneficial for most people. There is no evidence that carbon dioxide causes extreme weather. Man-made Climate Policy is a far greater and more certain danger than Man-made Climate Change.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the tide has turned in the war on carbon. Global warming stopped seventeen years ago; the carbon price collapsed a year ago; the EU is backpedalling on its disastrous green energy gamble; Russia, China, India, Japan, Canada, USA, Brazil and South Africa will not sign any binding Kyoto agreement; China has plans to build 160 new coal fired power stations in the next four years; and Tim Flannery has been sacked.

Calculations for those who wish to check:

Climate Change Authority Targets:

Year	Population (Million)	Emissions Total	Emissions per head	Index emissions per head
2000	19	100 (say)	5.26	100
2020	25	100	4.00	76 (24% reduction)
2020	25	81 (19% reduction)	3.24	61 (39% reduction)

China/UN IPCC Targets:

Year	Population (Million)	Emissions Total	Emissions per head	Index emissions per head
1990	17	100 (say)	5.88	100
2020	25	60 (40% reduction)	2.4	41 (59% reduction)

 

Viv Forbes,
Rosewood    Qld   Australia
forbes@carbon-sense.com
Viv Forbes is a science graduate, mineral economist, financial analyst, farmer, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition and has spent a lifetime studying the primary industries and the weather of Australia.

If you would like to read more see:

Climate Change Authority to propose 19% cut to emissions:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/climate-bodys-19pc-emissions-cut-to-heat-up-climate-debate/story-e6frg6xf-1226838724414#

No Global Warming for over 17 Years:
http://sppiblog.org/news/11163
http://sppiblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Monckton-graph1.png

European Carbon Price falls to Junk Status:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/04/carbon-trading

Global Temperatures continue to fall:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/fifteen-years-into-global-cooling-the-team-continues-to-maintain-their-scam/

China calls on developed nations to pay $400 billion and cut Carbon Dioxide emissions by 40% by 2020:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-06/china-calls-on-rich-nations-to-give-490-billion-for-climate.html

China and India building four Coal Fired Power Stations per week:
http://www.thegwpf.org/china-india-building-4-coal-power-plants-week/

The Green Energy Bust in Germany:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/green-energy-bust-in-Germany
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Arctic Ice Confounds Costly Computers

by Viv Forbes

Six years ago, the British BBC reported dolefully that climate models predicted the disappearance of Arctic Sea ice by 2013. This was supported by Al Gore, Australia’s ABC and all the usual alarmists.
 

Image sourced from [here]
 

Unfortunately for them, Arctic ice now stretches in a continuous sheet from Canada to Russia and twenty yachts that planned to publicise this year’s ice-free Arctic are now stuck in the ice.

 

Arctic ice comes and goes, continually confounding costly computer models.

 

Gillard’s carbon tax, Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, Abbott’s direct climate action and the Greens’ energy targets will have no effect on it.

 

 

Image source from [here]

 

For those who would like to read more: 

The original BBC scare-mongering:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm 

Recent report on how the Arctic ice cap has grown 60% in a year:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html 

And the Northern Hemisphere snow cover. No alarming losses here:

http://www.climate4you.com/SnowCover.htm#Northern%20hemisphere%20weekly%20snow%20cover%20since%201966

 

**********

 

Jennifer Marohasy also has a post about the artic sea ice area

Arctic Sea Ice Back

 

Perhaps it isn't the area but the thickness. From Bishop Hill

Long-term trends in sea ice

 

If you really want a lot of reading Anthony Watts keeps a detail record complete with data and all those graphs that everyone seems to like.
Sea Ice Page 

 

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Cows, Cars, and the Ethanol Con

by Viv Forbes

 

First published in Blues Magazine, April 2013.

Why are emissions from cows digesting grain classed as bad, whereas the same emissions from cars burning grain ethanol are lauded as green and good? 

Consider a paddock of corn. Most of the carbon in the growing plant comes from carbon dioxide in the air which is converted to plant material using solar energy via the magic of photosynthesis. Other minor carbon compounds come from the atmosphere via busy microbes in the soil. 

This plant material, either biomass or grain, can be fed to cattle or other livestock, made into ethanol for motor fuel, or made into food for people. 

 

Image from forbes

All cows, cars and people then use an internal digestion/combustion process to extract the energy collected and stored by the corn plants. 

In every case, this process produces gaseous emissions, mainly carbon dioxide. 

In cattle and people, some of the plant’s carbon is stored for a while in flesh and bones. The rest is emitted as the natural gases carbon dioxide and methane. This methane is soon oxidised in the atmosphere to produce carbon dioxide. 

In cars, virtually every atom of carbon in the ethanol burned produces one molecule of carbon dioxide. 

Over the life of a cow running on corn or a car running on ethanol, they both produce exactly the same carbon emissions from exactly the same plant input. Every atom of carbon extracted from the air by the green plant eventually returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the plant food. This is the natural carbon-based cycle of life. 

It is therefore scientific incompetence or deliberate fraud by global warming alarmists, vested interests and “scientists” to claim that consuming ethanol in cars is good and should be subsidised but consuming the same plant material in cows must be rationed and taxed. 

We are told that ethanol is a “renewable” energy. Closer inspection shows it ties up a lot of good cropping land; uses a lot of motor fuel to plant, harvest and transport the grain; and then a lot more energy to ferment, distil and distribute it to make up its mandated proportion of motor fuel.  Even more energy is used to make, transport and apply fertiliser. Growing corn for ethanol is a zero sum game at best. 

We can surely learn from history. 

Back in 2005, US corn prices were $2.30 per bushel. Then the US Congress mandated the use of ethanol in motor fuel so that even before the recent US drought, corn prices had risen to $5.50 per bushel. In 2007, the US Congress increased the quantity of ethanol to be added to gasoline and the demand for corn again soared. Then the widespread drought in the US reduced the supply of corn, and corn prices rose again to a peak of $8.34 per bushel in August 2012. The US is now using 40% of their corn harvest to provide about 10% of their vehicle fuel.

Such foolishness has done NOTHING for the climate, but has increased food prices, put more land under cultivation, increased nitrogen fertiliser use, and caused starvation in countries dependent on US corn exports. 

Ethanol madness has magnified the effects of the drought - twenty US ethanol plants have closed and cattle feedlots are closing because of a shortage of grain. 

And to cap the foolishness, ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. It is an inferior motor fuel, producing lower km/litre and also damaging some engines. 

An ethanol industry propped up by subsidies and mandates is un-sustainable. It increases the tax burden and pushes up the cost of grains, beef, pork, eggs, milk and cereals. Subsidising ethanol brings no benefits for the climate or the environment and harms the poor and hungry of the world. 

And should the world move into a period of natural global cooling, which is at least as likely as a resumption of last century’s gentle warming, food production will plummet and a world-wide food crisis will be upon us. 

It is time to end the ethanol con.  

No more forcing motorists to buy it. No more tax breaks for construction of ethanol plants. No more subsidies or special protection for ethanol speculators.  Let ethanol production compete fairly with all other sources of transport energy. 

And let’s have no more slander about emissions of the livestock industry which, when all is considered, is greener than the ethanol industry.

   

 
Sensible politicians need to stop pandering to the green lobby, stop posturing on the world green stage, learn some carbon chemistry, and stop burning food for fuel
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