UN Climate Change Conference Will Release "Plan" Today -- December 12, 2015

Updates

December 13, 2015: there was only one "binding" agreement to come out of the climate conference -- something about an effort to set a price on CO2 emissions for "trading purposes." If you read this closely, this has no chance of succeeding. Most countries did not agree to such a framework but agreed with this vague statement to be able to go home to report a "successful" outcome.

The entire agreement, 99% of which, apparently, is non-binding, does not go into effect for five year, not until 2020. This is much, much weaker than the Kyoto Protocol which required signatures. Anyone paying attention can see that the outcome of this conference was to simply kick the can down the road for five years. This is the capstone for the global climate movement. Nothing else will come of it. There will be no interest in re-convening another conference between now and 2020 and by then folks will say let the current agreement (that goes into effect in 2020) run for a few years before we have another global warming conference. That puts us out to about 2025.

Obama will not do anything with this (for a multitude of reasons) and the Time Person of the Year is also on her way out. No one else matters -- certainly not Russia, China, India. This whole movement will die on the vine assuming the next US president is not Hillary. Unfortunately with the Balkanization of the GOP, it is very likely Bill will be back in the White House in 2017.

Original Post

 

From The New York Times, "At the Paris climate conference, China has won praise for pledging to stop the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, largely by reducing its use of coal."

And in other news -- 

The New York Times is reporting that Chinese state enterprises have built or have contracts to build 92 coal plants in 27 countries since 2010:

Altogether, Chinese engineering firms have built or signed contracts to build 14 coal-fired plants along the Vietnamese coast over the past five years, most of them with the help of loans from the government’s China Export-Import Bank.

The building spree here is hardly unique. Since 2010, Chinese state enterprises have finished, begun building or formally announced plans to build at least 92 coal-fired power plants in 27 countries, according to a review of public documents by The New York Times.

And more:

Once complete, the 92 projects will have a combined capacity of 107 gigawatts, more than enough to completely offset the planned closing of coal-fired plants in the United States through 2020. The expansion is the equivalent of increasing China’s own coal-fired electricity output — already more than twice as much as any other country’s — by more than 10 percent.

The United States, Japan and other industrialized nations have helped finance the construction of coal-fired power plants in the developing world for decades, including in joint projects with China. Like China, they have usually required that contracts go to their companies. 

The final draft of the Paris climate change conference agreement to be released today, Saturday, December 12, 2015. And it looks like ... drum roll ... the number is .... 1 point ... drum roll .... 1 point 5 degrees ... 1.5 degrees....

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Thoughts -- Not Ready For Prime Time

Now that the conference is over -- I'm writing this at 2:15 p.m., Sunday, December 13, 2015 -- here are my thoughts. This is why I know President Obama, SecState Kerry, and Algore (as well as the rest of the world) know that "anthropomorphic global warming" is a scam.

Imagine that NASA scientists -- a NASA scientist is considered the "grandfather" of global warming -- announced that there was an asteroid ten times bigger than the one that hit the earth 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs was on course to hit the earth in ten years (that's ten years longer than they first told us "we" had to do something to prevent global warming to "save" the earth). Although they could not say (yet) where the asteroid would hit, it would destroy the earth. There were no doubts about it. The asteroid was on course to hit the earth.

NASA scientists provided a glimmer of hope saying that if adequate resources were available there might be a way to prevent the asteroid from hitting the earth. It would require a "Manhattan-like" project that would require pretty much the entire GDP for several years of the US, the EU, China, India, Russia, and Ireland.

My hunch is there would not be a two-week conference to decide if this was necessary. The only delay would be that delay for the Chinese, the Russians, the French space program, Ireland, and Apple to confirm that NASA was correct.

Once that confirmation was made, there would be no limit to the monetary expenses any of the countries would be willing to spend to fund the project, no matter how much the odds were against this from happening.

Again, remember that the global warmists have said that the earth will be "destroyed" if we don't prevent global warming, that 1.5 degrees (which, by the way, they can't even agree on that; some say 2.0 degrees; some say 3.0 degrees).

The most recent global warming conference which wrapped up this past weekend came up with an agreement that is non-binding, unsigned, and does not take effect for five years. 

If there was an asteroid heading directly for earth, I doubt global leaders would delay action for five years. The "agreement" that global leaders came up with is even less than the agreement the US made with Great Britain once it was determined that the UK had to be saved in WWII. There was a bigger financial and a bigger emotional commitment by Roosevelt to save Great Britain than there is currently to save the entire earth.

And that's why I know President Obama, SecState Kerry, and Algore (along with Angela and all the rest) do not take anthropomorphic global warming seriously. 

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Further Proof (As If Any Is Needed)

Further evidence that President Obama does not take AGW seriously. This major wind farm was proposed during the Bush administration and is nowhere close to getting off the ground. The Denver Post is reporting.  The headline: Bureaucratic gauntlet stalls renewable energy development on BLM land. Long-planned Anschutz Corp. wind power generation and transmission project in Wyoming might be functioning by 2023. The process began in the Bush administration, around 2006.

The story:

When Bill Miller first met with officials from the Bureau of Land Management to talk about his company's vision of building a 1,000-turbine wind farm on a checkerboard expanse of public and private land in Wyoming, President George W. Bush was in the White House. When agency officials warned Miller it could take five years for such a gigantic project to wade through environmental reviews, he told them: "That's the craziest thing I ever heard."

So it was music to Miller's ears when President Barack Obama's first Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, in 2009 announced as a top objective turning Western federal lands into hotbeds of renewable energy to deliver on two of the new president's pledges — creating jobs and transitioning to clean energy.

Miller's Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm was named a priority project. The BLM also fast-tracked a transmission-line project to carry the electricity — enough to power about 1 million homes.

And yet, all these years later, the wind and transmission projects still have not made it through BLM's bureaucratic gantlet.

But seven years into his presidency, Obama's record on renewable energy projects on public lands is mixed. His administration has done far more than any other to make the BLM a welcoming landlord for solar, wind and geothermal electricity, but there is also a lot of room for improvement. There still is great potential for reshaping public land-use policy in the West to take much greater advantage of abundant clean-energy resources such as wind and solar.

"We have come light years," says Michael Nedd, BLM's assistant director of Energy, Minerals and Realty Management and who oversees the agency's renewable program.

In 2009, the BLM had no staff, funding or rules dedicated to renewable energy projects. The agency now counts 57 projects that it has approved since then. The list includes some projects that have been canceled and others where the BLM plays only a bit part.

So far, only four solar arrays, five geothermal projects and three wind farms on BLM land actually deliver electricity to the grid in Western states. Still, Nedd says the agency is well on the way to meeting the president's goal of permitting enough renewable projects to provide electricity to 6 million homes by 2020. That will also mean setting up the infrastructure needed to keep permitting renewable power long into what Interior Secretary Sally Jewell calls "the renewable energy future."